25th November 07 Christ
the KingToday
is the feast of Christ the King. The last Sunday of the Church’s
year. The end of the great cycle of the story of Christ coming into the
world at Bethlehem, ministering, dying and rising, and ascending into
heaven. It’s a recently established feast, founded by Pope Pius
XI in 1925. He saw an increasingly secularised world around him –
Italy was notoriously anti-clerical. What people needed was a reminder
of who was really boss, a reminder of God’s authority (and by
extension the authority of the pope!) Golden
thrones, jewelled crowns, glory and might, the authority to command and
control – that is often what we mean when we hear the word power
– and that is probably what was in Pope Pius’ mind in the
1920’s to be honest. It is a picture that we may quite rightly
feel uneasy about today. But I think there is more to the feast of
Christ the King than triumphalism, and to see that we need look no
further than today’s Gospel. There
are a lot of people talking about kings and kingship in this story of
the death of Christ, but most of them are speaking only in mockery.
“If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” jeer the
soldiers at the battered, broken man hanging on the cross. Above his
head the sign reads “This is the King of the Jews”, the
grounds of his condemnation, the reason why he is being executed.
It’s intended to point up the irony of the situation.
There’s no kingly glory here, no jewels or gold, just a squalid
painful death. What kind of leader is this? A leader on a cross? A
leader with no followers? There are many things people look for in
their leaders, but allowing themselves to be put to death – and
such a powerless, pointless, humiliating death at that - isn’t
one of them. Leadership
and our expectations of our leaders has been much in the news this
week. The Northern Rock banking crisis, support for the military, the
loss of all that personal data in the post – criticism has all
focussed on those at the top – Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling,
the Head of HM Revenue and Customs, who has already had to fall on his
sword. Rightly or wrongly the opposition has claimed that all these
crises are signs of a failure of leadership. Sir Ian Blair, the head of
the Met, has had a rough week, narrowly surviving the latest threat to
his position – a vote of no confidence in his leadership. The Lib
Dems are looking for a new leader – again – too, arguing
about what qualities that person should have. And then there is the
England football team… Despite the fact that it was the players
who actually had the job of getting the ball in the net against Croatia
on Wednesday, it is the manager, the leader who has lost his job as a
result of their performance. We know what we want from leaders. We want
leaders to be strong and in control. We want them at least to look as
if they know what they are doing (even if they don’t). Most of
all we want them to deliver results. Measured
against these criteria, Jesus would never make the grade, and most of
those around him are quick to point it out – the soldiers who
crucify him, the Jewish leaders who mock him, the crowd who taunt him,
even one of the thieves who is being crucified with him. All they can
see is his failure. To them he is just another fool who has
over-reached himself, a weak man who, when things got tough,
didn’t have enough firepower on his side. Even his own friends,
for the most part, have deserted him. But
there is one man – just one – who sees things differently.
And it is quite extraordinary that he does so. The other thief who
hangs beside him seems, surprisingly, to have a completely different
take on what is going on. He rebukes the first thief. “We are
getting what we deserve,” he says, “but this man is
innocent.” And then he turns to Jesus and says “Jesus,
remember me when you come into your kingdom.” The truly
remarkable word in that request is the word “your” –
“your kingdom” he says. We look back on this story with
2000 years of hindsight, 2000 years of calling Christ King. We know how
the story ends. But the penitent thief simply sees what is in front of
his eyes. There is nothing in that sight – a broken man on a
cross – to suggest that Jesus will ever have a kingdom. He
can’t even save his own life at this moment – what on earth
makes the thief think he is going to rule over anyone else? What is it
that this thief sees which convinces him that Jesus is, despite outward
appearances, truly a king?To
understand what might be going on here it’s helpful for us to
spend a little time thinking about this word “power”.
I’m indebted to a colleague of mine, Roger Nichols, who shared a
little of the thinking of a theologian called Sally Purvis with me this
week. She’s written very helpfully of two different ways in which
we can exercise and experience power. The
first sort is what she calls “power as control”. It is
probably the most obvious sort of power to us. We use power as control
when we try to force others to do what we want, or manipulate them in
some way. It is the power used by tyrants and dictators, but also by
people who know which emotional buttons to push to get what they want.
“Power as control” can look benign, and people can mean
well when they use it. Parents often use their parental power to
control their children, telling them what they should do, or wear or
study. We sometimes do this long past the time when they might really
need us to act for them. We might think it is for their good, but it is
easy to fall into the trap of trying to force them into moulds that
they don’t really fit. Instead of equipping them for
independence, helping them live their own lives, we reduce their power
to make their own decisions. The
church has often used power as control – and it still does.
“Believe this! Don’t do that! Don’t ask questions!
It’s for your own good, even if it doesn’t feel that
way!” And the end result is that people stop being able to think
for themselves, and can’t develop a proper adult faith of their
own.In
the end “power as control” actually reduces the overall
amount of power around. It might look strong and decisive, but it
closes down options for people, shuts off their ability to take
initiative and saps their self-confidence. St Paul, in the epistle,
talks about God rescuing us from the power of darkness.
“Power as control” keeps us in the dark, unable to see
where we are going, unable to take responsibility for our own journey. But
there’s another sort of power, says Sally Purvis. She calls it
“power as life”. Look around you in the world. Every living
thing needs power in order to live. The power of the sun fuels the
growth of plants, the energy they store feeds animals and us. Power
sets things in motion, brings them into being. We talk about
“empowering” others – making it possible for them to
do things by sharing with them power we have. Knowledge is power–
when we share it we enable others to grow. A word of encouragement is
power , giving people confidence to set off in some new direction. Even
a challenge, lovingly given, is power – enabling people to turn
their lives around. “Power as life” enables people to
discover what they can do. We may never know the full consequences of
power used like this, and we certainly won’t be able to predict
or control what happens, but it can make all the difference. It
is this sort of power, I believe, that the penitent thief sees in
Jesus. And he sees it as they nail Jesus to the cross. Instead of
cursing his executioners Jesus prays “Father forgive them; for
they do not know what they are doing.” Jesus has no power
to save himself from death, no power, as the nails go in even to move,
but he still has the power that matters, the power to love and the
power to forgive, power that cannot control, but which can, and does
give life to others. We don’t know what effect that has on the
soldiers, but it transforms the thief. “Jesus, remember me when
you come into your kingdom” . Any fool can put on a suit of
armour or pick up a gun or press a button to fire a missile. It takes a
real king – someone truly worthy of the name – to forgive
those who persecute him and it is this sort of life-giving leadership
which the thief sees in Jesus. We
are often rightly wary of power. Power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely, as the saying goes. But power can also bring life
and hope to others, releasing their own power to change themselves,
opening them up to new possibilities.We
call Christ King, and it is right that we do so. We see in him power.
We see it in the great moments of triumph in his story - as he heals
and teaches, as the crowds acclaim him, as he rises from death and
ascends to heaven. But the greatest demonstration of his power is in
the story we have heard today, in his decision to “hang in
there” quite literally with the least and the lost, to forgive
even those who torture and kill him. It is this power which truly sets
us free and changes our lives, and it is this power that he invites us
to share as we learn to “hang in there” with those who need
his gift of life and hope today.Amen.

Seven
hundred years or so before the birth of Christ a man sat looking around
him at the world he lived in, ancient Judah, part of what we would now
call the nation of Israel. It was a brutal world and a brutal time. The
Assyrians, a mighty nation, ruled across most of the Middle East from
their strongholds in what is now Iraq. It was an empire like none that
had been seen before. Their armies had swept across the whole region
and they held it in an iron grip. They were infamous for their cruelty.
They destroyed without mercy, scattering defeated populations as slaves
across their empire, plundering and looting to fund the huge military
machine that kept the empire growing. A little nation like Judah stood
no chance against them. The Assyrians were at their gates, or perhaps
even within them already, bringing death and despair. All was lost.

I
imagine most people in that situation would have either given up hope,
or retreated into bitterness and fury, scrabbling for whatever safety
they could find for themselves. But this man didn’t. Instead he
wrote the words we heard in our first reading. “They shall
beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more.” Things wouldn’t always be
as they were now, he said. One day God would create from this wasteland
a new world, in which the nations would not learn war, but instead
create peace between themselves.

It’s
important that we know the background to these familiar words from the
prophet Isaiah because I think it is easy for us to be misled by their
beauty and to suppose that they were written by someone who really
didn’t understand how wicked and hopeless the world can be. They
can sound like unrealistic dreams, dreamt by someone who lived in an
ivory tower, protected and safe. But it wasn’t like that. Far
from it. They were written in the thick of appalling devastation, by
someone who was utterly powerless to do anything about it.

Isaiah’s
words were written long ago, and it might seem as if his dream is as
far off now as it was then. War is grimmer than it has ever been. Wars
have always taken a dreadful toll, but that toll has got greater as the
technology of death has developed. Weapons – conventional,
nuclear, biological, and chemical – are capable of wiping out
immense numbers of people indiscriminately. A small group of suicide
bombers can terrify a whole nation, disrupting its life completely.

But
just as Isaiah could hold onto hope in the face of the Assyrian hordes,
who were threatening to destroy his whole world, perhaps we should not
be too quick to give up on hope either.

Twenty
years ago this very day another man faced an appalling loss. This is
the twentieth anniversary of the Enniskillen bomb, when 11 people in
the crowd at a Remembrance Day gathering just like ours were killed by
the IRA. When the bomb went off Gordon Wilson was standing next to his
daughter Marie, at the town’s war memorial. He was holding her
hand under the rubble as she lost consciousness. His courage in
responding to that tragedy is famous. He refused to bear a grudge but
instead insisted on working for forgiveness and reconciliation between
Catholic and Protestant communities. That work didn’t end with
his own individual response, though. Out of the personal loss he and
his wife Joan suffered grew an organisation which is still going
strong, the Spirit of Enniskillen Trust. This group does all sorts of
work with young people growing up in places where there is conflict and
division. It helps them develop tools to listen and to debate
peacefully with those who differ from them so that they can end cycles
of vengeance and suspicion. They shall beat their swords into
ploughshares… said Isaiah. It is work like this that makes that
vision a reality today.

What
does it mean to beat your sword into a ploughshare? It means taking
something destructive and transforming it into something creative. A
sword kills: a ploughshare opens up the ground for new life, for the
seed to grow, to flourish and to multiply. Of course Gordon and Joan
Wilson were devastated at their daughter’s death, of course they
were angry, but they chose to take the sword of that anger and beat it
into a ploughshare that has brought life and hope to many others. They
are not alone in doing this. We can all think of examples. Nelson
Mandela, leading a process of reconciliation in South Africa, despite
his own suffering. Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, John McCarthy, who have
all been involved in work to promote healing and justice after their
long captivity as hostages in Lebanon. Many of those involved in the
British Legion’s work of caring and campaigning are motivated by
the desire that their own suffering in war should not be wasted pain, a
sword which destroys themselves and others, but be beaten into a
ploughshare to bring life out of death. In a sense it is a challenge
that faces our armed forces too as they try to wage war in a way that
will in the end build lasting peace.

For
Christians, the prime example of this act of beating swords into
ploughshares is that of Christ himself, who took the cross – an
instrument of death – and turned it into the gateway to new life
and hope, a demonstration and a promise that God’s love is not
defeated even by the worst the world can do. He could have avoided his
death – changed his message to suit those in power. He knew what
would happen –preaching a message of radical equality and
welcome, empowering those whom others had a vested interest in keeping
down was bound to get him into trouble, but he did it anyway. For
countless millions of his followers, it is this symbol, this story,
which has inspired them to respond to evil with love over the
centuries, and to keep responding that way even when they themselves
suffered as a result.

I’ve
never beaten a real sword into a real ploughshare and I don’t
suppose you have either, but my guess is that it would not be an easy
thing to do. It must take effort and time. It must be noisy, perhaps
painful too. You’d have to be skilled and practiced in
metalwork. You’d also need a good deal of faith. What if
you need that sword again in a hurry – what will you do then?
Above all it would be an active process, a process in which you have to
get personally involved. It wouldn’t happen all in a moment all
by itself as if by magic. In the same way, choosing God’s way of
life and love rather than destruction and hate is not easy either. That
is why people so often fail to do it, why they lapse so readily into
seeking vengeance, into narrow sectarianism and prejudice, into a
fearful suspicion of anything or anyone different. Perhaps we hope that
we will never be faced with the challenges Isaiah or the Wilsons, or
Nelson Mandela faced. Perhaps we would rather not think about how we
would behave if we were. But the truth is that it is no good waiting
until the bomb goes off or the Assyrians are at the gate to discover
what we are made of. Those heroes of reconciliation were able to
respond as they did because they were already in practice, already in
the habit of beating swords into ploughshares in their everyday lives.We
may not like to recognise it, but the truth is that we all carry swords
that need beating into ploughshares right here and now. We can all
wield weapons of destruction if we choose to. They may not be made of
steel or iron, but they are no less damaging. Our words and our
attitudes can destroy others. Our silence can mean that evil goes
unchecked. Our greed can rob others of the chance of life. Jealousy,
fear, insecurity can lead us to cut others down. We look for the causes
of war in great political events, the decisions of governments and
generals, but in reality they start far further back, in the small
decisions that each of us make about the way we relate to those around
us. The second reading we heard today, from the letter of James talked
about some of those ways of relating – envy, selfish ambition,
boastfulness and falsehood. On their own they may not seem dramatic,
but taken together it is our small actions, or inactions, that are the
seeds that lead to war.

But
the good news is that just as war is our responsibility, something we
set in train here and now in the small things we do, so also is peace.
Whenever we see that we are hurting others and do something to set that
right, we strike a hammer blow that shapes a destructive sword into a
ploughshare of love. Whenever we turn aside to address a wrong that we
would rather ignore, we beat a sword of apathy and indifference into a
ploughshare of hope.Whenever
we look at another person and see the common humanity we share with
them rather than the differences of culture or outlook that divide us
we take one small step towards a world where all will walk together in
the light.

They
shall beat their swords into ploughshares. We all hold in our hands the
tools that shape the future. It is up to us whether they are swords
that bring death and despair or ploughshares that bring life and hope.Amen

4th Nov 07 - Evening Service for All Souls'
DayEcclesiastes 3.1-8,Revelation 7. 9-17
I know that tonight many of you have come here full of memories. I also
know that those memories are very different, and that each of you is in
a different place, at a different stage, mourning and remembering in
different ways. Some of you remember a very recent loss , still very
raw and difficult. Some perhaps remember those who died a long time
ago, but are still dear to you. Some grieve at the end of a long life
well lived which ended peacefully. Some grieve a sudden or traumatic
loss or a life cut short. Some have the difficult grief of mourning
those whose lives were tangled or sad, where relationships were bad,
where there was unresolved anger or a sense of failure.

But the thing we probably all have in common if we mourn a loss is that
we are bound to find ourselves looking back into the past. It is
inevitable, and it is important. As we remember, we give thanks and we
reflect on what those we mourn have meant to us. But there is a danger
if that is all we do. We shouldn’t be content to stop at that.
For Christians death isn’t just about looking back. It
isn’t just about the past. It is also about looking forward,
about the future.

It is about the future for the one who has died. We can’t know
the detail – the Bible speaks in many different pictures of that
future – as a city, a banquet, a homecoming, a chorus of praise
amidst a mighty throng of saints and angels. In the reading we heard
tonight there was the wonderfully personal and close image of God
wiping every tear away – one by one – you can’t wipe
tears any other way – every person coming before God not a fierce
judge but a loving parent.

It is about the future for the one who has died. It is also about the
future for those who live – our future. Joyce Grenfell wrote a
poem that in anticipation of those who would mourn her death, “If
I should go before the rest of you,/Break not a flower nor inscribe a
stone/ Nor when I’m gone speak in a Sunday voice/ But be the
usual selves that I have known/ Weep if you must, parting is hell, but
life goes on, so sing as well!”

Sing as well – a hard thing to do. And it may be a long time
before we find the song that we need to sing, the new life that comes
if we let it even into what look like the barren fields of grief. What
that song is depends on who we mourn and what they meant to us. It
might be a song of thanksgiving for the gifts they have given us and
the memories we have of them. It might be a song of relief if we have
watched them suffer, a song which celebrates the peace that comes when
suffering ends. It might even be a song of freedom if the relationship
we mourn was a difficult one which seemed to have no resolution
–we can put that person into God’s hands knowing he will
heal and help them even though we might not have been able to.

Each of you – and it is true for me as well – comes here
tonight with memories of those who have died. God calls us to rejoice
as we remember them, and trust his promise that they sing in
heaven with the angels and the saints. But he also calls to us to sing
as well, by living the lives he has given us to the full until the day
when we shall join them.

As we consider our readings today we offer the prayer which we heard St
Paul wrote to the Ephesians – I pray that the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give us a spirit of wisdom and
revelation, so we you may know him better. Amen.

On November 1, those who define saints as people who are sanctified
look back at the history of the church and celebrate those saints who
have lived holy lives, provided examples, and left us later generations
with a church that can continue to serve God. Those who view sainthood
in terms of justification look forward to living as the saints God has
made them to be. They emphasize the “All” in All Saints Day
and define a saint as anyone for whom Christ has died — so a very
long list, indeed.

Inheritance. What thoughts does the word trigger in your mind? Possibly
Tax, many people plan carefully in their life to minimise inheritance
tax on their death and leave as much as they can for those they love.
More likely we think of relatives and whatever they may leave for us,
probably either cash or things we can turn into cash like shares or
land and buildings. We could inherit their debts and problems as well
of course!

So what about us as Christians, we may well inherit money or
possessions but this is not what Paul talks of, he is interested in an
inheritance far greater than this. He speaks of ‘redemption as
Gods own people’, a world redeemed by God in which Jesus is
central.

And in this morning's reading from Paul’s Letter to the
Ephesians, and in all of Paul's letters, the word saint is applied
without further distinction to the company of those who believe in
Jesus and who are prepared to enter the struggle to live faithfully
according to his teachings and his example.

But Paul also points out that we don’t just have to wait in hope,
that the holy spirit is available to each of us now as part of the rich
inheritance we await and marks us out as those set to receive. Paul
uses the word pledge or guarantee and the implication is that there is
an agreement of contractual or covenant strength.

Tom Wright describes the Spirit as the down payment, part of the
promised future, coming forwards to meet us in the present. The spirit
is the sign that we shall one day possess it fully. God has given us
the spirit as a sign and foretaste of the renewed world which awaits us
as our inheritance. Now this really is a life changing inheritance.
Discovering that we are to receive an inheritance like that has the
power to change our entire life, if we are prepared to let it.

The good news is that we don’t have to be dead to be a saint
which means that we can make a start today if we haven’t already
done so. In our own daily lives and struggles, we have the opportunity
to continue the tradition of sainthood.

We can love and help not only the oppressed, but also those who
oppress and exclude us. It can be hard to think of ourselves as
saintly but opportunities for us to behave in a saintly way are many.
Perhaps those on the fringes are able to recognise them more readily, a
group called ‘out in scripture’ describe true sainthood for
them as ‘a personal daily decision to love in spite of what
others say or do to ignore or hurt us.

We sometimes see people who amaze us with their patience and
understanding, describing then as having ‘the patience of a
saint’. Such people seem to have qualities most of us struggle to
see in ourselves. Most of us don’t have any trouble loving our
children even though they drive us nuts from time to time. For most
parents our love for our children is unconditional and our willingness
to forgive inexhaustible.

The real challenge occurs when Jesus comes along and tells us that not
only are we to love those who love us but we’re even to love
those who don’t love us! Many of us read that and think,
“This just isn’t possible.”

The people who would rob me, kill me, destroy my way of life, the
people who I’m in bitter dispute with, I’m supposed to love
them and pray for them. This is certainly not something which comes
naturally to many of us.

For example hear this little story I read recently:-

Late one summer evening in Nebraska, a weary truck driver pulled into
an all-night truck stop. The waitress had just served him when three
tough looking, leather jacketed motorcyclists - of the Hell’s
Angels type - decided to give him a hard time. Not only did they
verbally abuse him, one grabbed the hamburger off his plate, another
took a handful of his french fries, and the third picked up his coffee
and began to drink it.

How would you respond? Well, this trucker did not respond as we might
expect. He calmly rose, picked up his bill, walked to the front of the
room and put his money on the cash register, and went out the door. The
waitress followed him to put the money in the till and stood watching
as the big truck drove away into the night.
When she returned, one of the bikers said to her, "Well, he’s not
much of a man, is he?" She replied, "I don’t know about that, but
he’s certainly not much of a truck driver did you see those three
motorbikes he ran over as he drove out of the parking lot!

If you don’t smile with satisfaction on hearing that story then your
thoughts are certainly more saintly than mine.

-Sounds like justice, doesn’t it? When someone wrongs us our
first instinct is to get them back! Our first instinct is to make them
hurt as much as they hurt us. That is the world’s answer to being
wronged. But Jesus gives His followers a different response
they’re to have. He tells us we’re to love our enemies.

Who but a saint could truly love his or her enemies, turn the other
cheek, or habitually give someone the shirt off his or her back?

It seems it is only those who have the deepest roots in Christ who can
react in this way, the way of what often appears to be an absurdly
generous God. Inspirational figures such as Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther
King and Terry Waite give us some idea how it’s done. They have
demonstrated that what can often appear to be an upside down world to
us means that their faith in Christ cannot be destroyed or diverted,
whatever the actions of those who oppose them.

Our reading from Daniel where he visualises 4 different empires as
beasts contrasts short lived and often depraved power with the power of
an eternally loving God.

At the time of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians much power was
concentrated in Ephesus; the Romans gave it high social and civic
status. Many influential figures or to use modern language serious
players would have been based there.

Worldly power and Gods power seem to have had a difficult relationship
throughout history.

I’m currently working my way through Alistair Campbell’s
diaries and even though I’ve only read the first 100 pages two
things are becoming apparent, the first is the unbelievably huge ego of
Alistair Campbell, at least at the time he recorded his diaries and the
second is his bewilderment with the fact that the man he respects and
admires, Tony Blair, can have a faith in God.

I’ve had it said to me by people I’ve met through
businesses who don’t consider me totally stupid that they find it
amazing that I can have a faith. They seem to find it totally
acceptable that large numbers of uneducated Africans, for example,
might believe but are bewildered that people similar to them might
investigate Christianity and come out believing that there is a loving
and powerful God with a purpose for our lives.

Campbell tells of the time when he accompanied Tony Blair on a visit to
Dunblane after the shooting dead of pupils at the local school. The
headmaster explained many horrors of the events including his attempts
at stuffing paper into a little girls back wound. Having heard these
accounts Campbell turned on Tony Blair asking ‘what his God
thought of all this’. How could he see something like this and
still believe in some great divine being who offers nothing but good.
‘His reply was ‘just because the killer is bad, this
doesn’t mean that God is not good’.

I certainly don’t have the answers to situations like these but
believe that a God who is as powerful as ours will sometimes bewilder
us will act, or apparently not act, in ways beyond our comprehension
even though such events are a huge challenge to our faith.

How would the followers of Christ felt at his crucifixion? Yet Paul was
later able to talk of how ‘God put his power to work in Christ
when he raised him from the dead.’ Being a saint means being able
to struggle on with our faith in spite of what we see around us and our
own failures.

In fact the only description of a saint I can relate to is someone
never gives up trying in their mission to spread Gods love and build
his kingdom no matter how many times they feel a total failure in their
efforts to do so. Knowing such a forgiving yet powerful God means that
we can look forward to an inheritance far richer than anything
we’ll ever receive on earth, and as yet we don’t even have
to pay tax on it!
That’s the good news we share this day with all the saints on
earth and all the saints who have gone before us and all the saints who
will come after us. We rejoice that God has called us to sainthood and
for having given us a totally new way of looking at life. Amen

I grew up in the Church of England, but when I was a student in Hull I
worshipped for a while at all sorts of different churches, sampling the
different styles of worship on offer. One of the churches I remember
most vividly was a little Elim Pentecostal church that met in a back
street of a run down part of the city. They were wonderfully warm and
welcoming people, but their services were distinctly eccentric to
someone brought up in the C of E.

There was no organ for a start, nor even a piano. The hymns were
accompanied by the only musician they had on the only musical
instrument they had, a rather out of tune and squeaky violin – it
was a bit painful. Apart from the sermon the service wasn’t
planned in advance. Anyone could choose a hymn or read from the Bible
or pray. The prayers were all made up on the spot – they
disapproved firmly of reading prayers out of a book. They should come
from the heart, inspired there and then by God’s Spirit, and how
could they do that if they were written in advance, they said?

Every service should have been completely different, then, a one-off,
but actually those Elim Pentecostal services were just as predictable
as anything you might find in an Anglican church with its fixed
liturgy. A pattern of hymns and readings had emerged naturally. Even
the prayers were suspiciously similar from one week to the next, prayed
by the same people, often in the same order. You could soon tell what
mattered to each person – what the bee in their bonnets was. And
there was often a great deal going on under the surface of the prayers.
Mrs So and So would stand up and pray, and then, Mr Someone else would
stand up and pray a prayer which flatly contradicted the one before
– in the nicest possible way of course, all dressed up in churchy
language. If she prayed a prayer of thanks for the warm weather, he
would pray for those who found it too hot for comfort. If he prayed for
those in distant countries, she would remind God that there were folk
close to home who needed his help far more. The prayers were a
battlefield of old grievances and personality clashes. They
wouldn’t dream of arguing face to face, but prayer was the
perfect place to have a go at those you thought needed setting
straight.

The prayers in that church revealed a good deal more about the people
who prayed than they realised, and that is true for all of us. Even if
we pray in words that others have written, our choice of prayers will
give the game away, telling others what we believe, whether we intend
them to or not. That’s what happens in the story we heard in
today’s Gospel.

Two men go up to the Temple to pray, says Jesus. A Pharisee and a
tax-collector. The Pharisee prays “God, I thank you that I am not
like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this
tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my
income.” The tax- collector, on the other hand, just acknowledges
his sinfulness and asks for God’s forgiveness. What do their
prayers reveal about them, and why is it that, in the end, it is the
tax-collector who goes home justified rather than the Pharisee?

It may seem obvious. The Pharisee sounds very arrogant to our ears,
blowing his own trumpet like that, boasting of his goodness. But
actually that’s not the real problem. This isn’t a public
prayer – no one but God hears him. He’s not showing off to
look good in the eyes of others. He is standing by himself, not in a
crowd. Nor is there any evidence that he was lying about himself
– Jesus doesn’t accuse him of hypocrisy. He
isn’t a rogue, a thief or an adulterer. He isn’t a
treacherous tax-collector, collaborating with the occupying Roman
forces to exploit his own people. He’s a good guy, in the
understanding of the times, and why shouldn’t he rejoice in that,
and give thanks that he has avoided the temptation to sin?
Actually this prayer wouldn’t have sounded half as bad at the
time as it does to us. There are plenty of examples of similar prayers
from those times, and I guess many of us, if we are lucky enough to
enjoy happiness and stability would be glad of it and want to celebrate
it too.

So why does his prayer come in for such criticism?
I think the clue may be in what the story tells us about where these
men are when they pray. The Pharisee, as I’ve said, is standing
“by himself”. He’s on his own physically, but I
suspect he is on his own in other ways too. It is as if he is on an
island, a piece of moral high ground all of his own. He stands there,
in splendid isolation, looking out over the morass of the world around
him seeing it only as a contrast to the safe, shiny cleanness of his
own life. He has no compassion for those drowning in the swamps he
looks down on. He doesn’t ask God how he can help those whose
lives are in a mess, and he certainly doesn’t stop to think that
he might have had any responsibility for creating the difficulties that
other people labour under. The word Pharisee meant separated one
and that’s just how he liked it to be.

The fact is though – and it is as true now as it was then –
that we are all linked together. Whether we mean to or not our actions
affect others, making their journey through the world easier or harder.
This Pharisee’s prayer shows how he regards others. He treats
them with contempt, seeing only their failings. And in doing so he
loads them with twice as many burdens than they are carrying already.
They may have been struggling in the swamp already, but his
condemnation could be the stone that makes them sink. And he is
completely blind to this.

We are all linked to one another. It’s not always obvious but it
is the truth. We may not deliberately set out to hurt people, but
anything we do can make a difference to them for better or worse.
Climate change and fair trade campaigns have helped us see how things
we do can damage vulnerable communities far away. Closer to home we can
see how the choices we make can distort our own society too. Home
owners want house prices to rise to increase the value of their
property, but that means that the young and the poor can’t afford
a home at all, or are left to live on run-down estates. Schools
rise or sink because parents who have the money or know-how find ways
of playing the system. Our post office is threatened with closure
because too many of us have gone elsewhere and because we’ve
allowed post offices to be regarded as businesses rather than public
services. When we exercise our power to choose we are just trying
to do the best for ourselves and our families but the game of
life is played with loaded dice – and they are loaded in favour
of those who are already winning. Those with power and wealth,
those whose lives are sorted out and secure, like our
“good” Pharisee, will always have more clout than the poor,
the vulnerable, and those whose lives have been broken in some way.

But the Pharisee can’t see this. He rejoices in his good fortune
in having such a stable and successful life, assuming that it is all
his own work. He doesn’t even give God any credit for the way his
life’s turned out. He stands by himself, in a world of his own,
disconnected from others, and disconnected from God too. There is
nothing he needs from God because all is well with him.

The tax-collector, by contrast, knows that nothing is as it ought to be
in his life. He stands “far off”. Far off
literally from the centre of the Temple, hovering on its margins,
feeling unfit to go closer in, because he knows he is also far off from
where he needs to be morally, far off from the life he knows he ought
to be living. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” he
prays. He’s all too painfully aware of his part in the mess of
his world, betraying his own people, collecting the money that funded
the armies that oppressed them. He’s painfully aware too of his
need of God. Nothing is well with him.

And that, says Jesus, is precisely why he goes home justified, because
he knows his need. Justification is a word that theologians usually use
to talk about God’s declaration of forgiveness of us, forgiveness
that we don’t earn, but which comes to us as a free gift. But
I’m not convinced that is all it means here. The word
that’s used here doesn’t just mean declaring that something
is right, it also means making it right, setting it straight. The
tax-collector is accepted and forgiven by God, but as well as that,
from this moment on, because he has opened his life to change, God can
begin to heal him. He doesn’t only declare him just. He also
starts to make him just, creating justice in and through him. This
story isn’t about life after death, about getting into heaven,
but about the healing that God wants to bring about now.

Let’s be honest. Most of us would rather that we were on the
moral high ground, secure and safe in our own goodness, happy with our
lives like the Pharisee. It feels far more comfortable. But it is a
delusion. We look around at a world that is full of pain, where people
are twisted by poverty, crime, dishonesty and greed. We are all
involved in making that world, in great ways or in small ones, by the
things we do and the things we avoid doing. The mess and brokenness of
the world is our mess and brokenness too. This story tells us that we
can choose to pray the prayer of the Pharisee – a prayer of
isolation and self-righteousness that will heal no one - or we can
choose to pray the prayer of the tax-collector, owning up to our own
fallibility, and letting God begin to set us straight, for our sake and
the sake of all whom our lives touch.
Amen

I’ve spread around the chapel tonight some postcard sized photos
of one of my favourite works of art. You can see it in the Tate
Britain. It is by Epstein, and it is called Jacob and
the Angel.
It’s a representation of the story we heard from the Old
Testament this evening. You’ll recall Jacob, I’m sure.
He’s one of the twin sons of Isaac. The younger twin - and
he’s never quite forgiven his brother Esau for being born first.
He’s a tricky customer, is Jacob. He tricks his brother out of
his birthright for the price of a bowl of lentil soup. He tricks his
father into giving him his dying blessing instead of Esau. He tricks
his father-in-law into giving him a flock of sheep, though his
father-in-law has tricaked him into working seven years for his older
daughter Leah, when he really wanted the younger one, Rachel, so I
suppose that evens things up. But, to cut a long story short, his life
seems to be marked by a conviction that nothing will ever come to him
unless he fights for it, by fair means or foul.

Then one night, by the ford of the Jabbok, he meets his match; a
mysterious stranger, whom he struggles with all night. At daybreak
there is stalemate. Jacob is wounded, but still he won’t let the
stranger go. “I will not let you go until you bless me,” he
says. Here is someone he can’t defeat, someone who is stronger
than him, but he won’t turn tail and run from difficulty and
danger either. The stranger tells him that no more will he be called
Jacob, but Israel, which means, “one who wrestles with
God”. And Jacob finally gets it – this stranger is God,
represented by Epstein as an angelic being. Epstein’s sculpture
captures the moment of exhausted surrender. They have been locked in
each others arms while they have wrestled, but this is the moment when
the angel’s wrestling hold turns into an embrace as he supports
Jacob to stop him falling. It is a moment that is full of power –
there is nothing ethereal about this angel, or about Jacob – they
are very solid alabaster, representing very solid flesh, and more than
life size. But this piece is also full of tenderness, full of
compassion, full of vulnerability.

I love this sculpture because I know how often I need to be reminded
that it is safe to collapse into the arms of God, that everything
doesn’t depend on me, that I don’t have to have life all
figured out all the time. Most of us probably know what it feels like
to struggle. We try hard. We try to keep it all together. We try to
work out the answers to life’s confusions, to find solutions to
impossible dilemmas. We try at least to look as if we know what
we are doing. We want to succeed. We hate to admit we’ve failed
or come to the limits of our capability. But this story, and this
sculpture, reminds me that it is the moment when I admit defeat that I
discover what I really need to know – that God has been there all
the time, in the struggle, in the darkness, working his own work in my
life, blessing me in through the difficulties not despite them.
It’s often not in the answers, but in the questions that I find
him; not in the faith, but in the doubts; not in my triumphs and
strengths, but in my failures and weakness. When, like Jacob, I can
accept that I am beaten by life, it is then that I discover the true
depths of God’s love and faithfulness.

Tonight, as we share silence, look at this picture and ponder the
story. What are the struggles in your life that you’d love to
defeat but know you never will? How might God be in them? How might you
be able to say to whatever you struggle with, “I will not let you
go until you bless me”?
Amen

14th October 2007 Trinity 19Luke
17.11-19
In today’s gospel we meet a man, a Samaritan. He doesn’t
say much, but behind his few words, we can be sure, lies a story that
matters, so I thought today, we’d hear his story. And this is how
it might have been.

“I was born out in the borderlands, “he says, this
Samaritan”. I lived in the land between Galilee and Samaria. Now,
you’re going to tell me that there isn’t any land between
Galilee and Samaria, and that’s true if you look on a map. They
are right next to each other. You are either in one or the other,
technically speaking, but real geography isn’t about lines drawn
on paper. It is what goes on up here, in your mind, that really
matters. Where does Galilee end and Samaria begin? It all depends who
you ask. No one in power cares much anyway. Not much happens here
– nothing that matters. It is the back of beyond, the middle of
nowhere. The Samaritans and Jews that live here, we fight over it
from time to time, but mostly we just have to get along as best we can.
We’ve got our differences – everyone knows that.
Don’t get us started on religious questions, or you’ll
never hear the last of it! But day by day we till the same soil, graze
our flocks on the same hillsides, live side by side in our villages
– we have to. And we catch the same diseases too.

That’s what happened to me. One morning I noticed a patch of
blotched skin on my arm and soon the blotches had spread, till the
whole of my body was mottled with it. I knew what it was. Leprosy. We
call all sorts of skin conditions by that name, because in truth it
doesn’t make any difference what causes them, the outcome’s
the same. You are banished from the village, banished from your family
until your skin is back to normal. We didn’t go far away, those
of us in this strange exile. Just to the edge of the village. That was
the hardest thing in many ways. From where our makeshift camp was we
could see the homes we’d left behind. We could see other people
cooking, eating, laughing, playing with their children, growing their
figs and olives, but for us there was none of that any more. We eked
out an existence however we could, begging for food if we could, hoping
for a cure. Sometimes people would help us. But many more gave us a
wide berth – even our friends and family. We were unclean.
We’d brought this on ourselves somehow, they said. And they
wanted nothing to do with us.

Some of us got lucky – these skin diseases weren’t always
permanent. Sometimes they’d vanish as suddenly as they’d
arrived. Then it was simple. You took yourself off to the priests
– Jews to a Jewish priest, Samaritans to a Samaritan one. They
looked you over and if there was no sign of the disease you were free
to go back to your families. Hey presto! As simple as that! But why
some were healed and some not was a mystery. All we could do was wait
and hope.

There were ten of us living in our little settlement just beyond the
edge of the village on the day that Jesus came. I forget now how many
were Jews and how many Samaritans – that sort of thing stopped
mattering after a while. We didn’t know who he was at first. He
was travelling with friends, walking along the road that headed south
to Jerusalem, but we knew it was always worth a try with a new face, so
we were quickly up on our feet and heading for the roadside. We kept
our distance, of course. If you frighten people by coming too close,
you can be sure they won’t give you anything.

But one of us was sure he’d seen him before, the leader of this
band of travellers. “He’s that teacher that
everyone’s been talking about. Jesus from Nazareth. There are all
sorts of stories about him. Some say he’s healed people. Even
brought the dead to life.” “A healer,” we said,
holding our breath. “What about us – could he heal us too?
Samaritans as well as Jews?” “Who knows? But it’s got
to be worth a try”. “Master – Jesus – have
mercy on us…on us…we need you...” “He’s
going on by – he hasn’t seen us.” “Master
– over here – Jesus – take pity…!”
“He’s coming over – don’t come too close, Jesus…”
“What’s that he’s saying…?”
“Go and show yourself to the priests?”

To be honest it was a bit disappointing. Was he just trying to get rid
of us? He’d said no prayers, performed no rituals, and it
didn’t look as if anything had changed. What was the point of
going to the priests? We’d tried that before, some of us.
You’d think there was a bit of an improvement. You’d rush
off to show them. “See, look, it’s getting better,
honestly…” but they’d turn you away. It was all or
nothing – one unhealed patch was all it took for them to send you
away again. Still, Jesus sounded so confident when he said it, and what
did we have to lose?

So we set off into the village, calling out as we went to warn people
we were coming. We hadn’t gone far though, when one of us –
I don’t know who – let out a huge cry of joy.
“It’s gone! It’s worked! I’m clean!” One
by one we all looked at ourselves and at each other. We rolled up our
sleeves and peered at our arms, then threw off our clothes and turned
and twisted about, our hearts in our mouths – surely it was just
wishful thinking! But no. All there was was good clean flesh –
not a sign or a mark on any of us!

And then, all of a sudden, as it sunk in that this nightmare really was
over, the others set off, running down the road, towards the centre of
the village, where the priests lived. I saw them scatter at the bottom
of the road, Jews one way, Samaritans the other. That was the end of
our little brotherhood. But I stayed where I was. Somehow I was rooted
to the spot. What was the point of heading for the priests’
house? What had they had to do with this healing? Nothing. It was that
man back there, Jesus of Nazareth, out on the margins where we had
been, who had done it, with hardly a word spoken, with no need for us
to explain or justify ourselves, not even caring whether we were Jews
like him, or Samaritan strangers.

And what would the priests say if I went to them anyway?
“Ok, you’re clean, you can come back into our nice safe
world. Everything can go back to being the way it was” But
nothing could ever be the same as it had been as far as I could see.
I’d been changed out there on the edge of the village. I’d
learnt what it was like when your friends and family suddenly turned
against you, didn’t want you. I’d been like that too before
I got ill. But how could I go back now to treating people like that?
Why would I want to? For all the pious talk I’d heard there, it
wasn’t in the village, keeping the rules, that I’d found
God, it was out in no man’s land, through Jesus of Nazareth, that
God had really broken into my life.

So, as fast as the others had run into the village, I ran out of it. I
suppose that means that I’m still not sorted out in the eyes of
the priests – I’ve never jumped through their hoops like I
should. But I wanted to be back where Jesus was. The edge of a village,
the back of beyond, the middle of nowhere. It shouldn’t be a
place for miracles. It’s not where you expect to find the creator
of the universe at work, but perhaps that’s because we never
think to look there?

But that’s where Jesus was, and that’s where he stayed
– out on the edge to the very end. I stuck with him as he went to
Jerusalem, went to his death there, and I’ve stuck with him ever
since. He died just as we lepers had lived, outside the walls of the
city, on a cross, in the place where they threw the rubbish. They
reckoned they’d pushed him out far enough that he could do no
harm to their nice tidy systems, but they were wrong. They forgot that
they couldn’t control God. He could be at work wherever he wanted
to be. In a leper camp, on a cross, in a borrowed tomb, or rising from
death to confound them.

It was Jesus’ own people who killed him, aided and abetted by the
Romans, but if he’d been a Samaritan like me, or from any other
group, I know it would have been just the same. It’s not about
religion, it’s about fear. I’ve thought about my home
village and its leper camp outside the boundaries often since. And as I
look around, it seems to me that the world is full of places just like
it. Those with success, health, wealth and power look nervously out at
anyone or anything that seems to threaten them. They build the walls a
little higher and firmer to keep the inside in and the outside out, to
keep everything sorted and neatly ordered. Just like the people in my
village, they think that if they do that they can protect themselves.
Some of them even seem to think they’re protecting God, the
ultimate insider to them, imprisoned in their walls.

But actually it’s not like that at all. If only they knew it,
more often than not, as they gaze anxiously out at the boundaries and
into the wilderness beyond, God is looking right back at them.
He’s already out there where the flotsam and jetsam are, the
mixed up, blotched and battered, in-between people – people like
me, people like you perhaps too - people who know they’ll never
make it in the world’s eyes, but people who discover that it
doesn’t matter at all if you know that you are held in
God’s embrace.”

When
Bill Clinton was President of the United States his spiritual adviser
was a pastor called Tony Campolo. I went to hear Campolo talk on a
visit to London at the time. I’m naturally (and probably
unfairly) suspicious of American preachers as once I hear their accent
I find it hard to disassociate them from the sharp suited, tanned TV
evangelists with their perfect hair and pearly white smiles.

The
bald guy with glasses I saw didn’t fit this mould and nor did
what I heard. I felt encouraged not because he had all the answers but
because he acknowledged the reality of the messy lives lead by many,
after all he had the opportunity to advise Bill Clinton in one or two
high profile situations in his time in office.

Campolo
wrote a book called “The Kingdom of God is a Party.” In
this, he tells the story of a trip to Honolulu in the mid 1980’s.
Having crossed far too many time zones from Philadelphia to Hawaii, he
found himself awake and needing breakfast at 3:30am local time. He
ended up in a greasy spoon what we’d call a café and the
Americans call a Diner ordering a donut and a coffee, and while
he’s consuming this wholesome breakfast in walked 8 or 9
prostitutes. The place is small, Campolo is surrounded, and decides the
best thing to do is to get out of there. Then he overhears one of them
say, “Tomorrow is my birthday; I’ll be 39.” Somebody
else tears into her. “So?? Whadya want me to do about it?? Want
me to throw you a party, bake you a cake, sing “happy
birthday???” The first responded ‘Why do you have to be so
mean? I’m just telling you, you don’t have to put me down.
I don’t want anything. I’ve never had a birthday party my
whole life, why should I have one now. I’m just saying.”

Tony
Campolo hangs around till they leave, then asks the man who runs the
place if those people come in every night. They do, so Campolo asks if
he could throw that one prostitute a big birthday party the next night.
They get excited about the idea, make all the arrangements decorate the
diner, the chef bakes a cake, somebody gets the word out on the street.
This is how Campolo describes the scene:

“By
3:15 every prostitute in Honolulu was in the place. It was wall-to-wall
prostitutes… and me! At 3:30 on the dot, the door of the diner
swung open and in came Agnes and her friend. I have everybody ready and
when they came in we all screamed, “Happy birthday!”

Never
have I seen a person so flabbergasted … so stunned … so
shaken. Her mouth fell open. Her friend grabbed her arm to steady her.
As she was led to one of the stools along the counter we all sang
“Happy Birthday” to her. As we came to the end of our
singing with “happy birthday dear Agnes, happy birthday to
you,” her eyes moistened. Then, when the cake was carried out
with all the candles on it, she lost it and just openly cried.”

She
couldn’t blow out the candles. She couldn’t cut the cake.
In fact, she was so overwhelmed that she asked if she could just keep
the cake for a little while. The gruff chef said, “It’s
your cake. Go ahead.” And so Agnes picked the cake up and carried
it home as if it were the most precious thing imaginable.

The
crowd was stunned into silence. Not knowing what else to do, Campolo
said; “what do you say we pray?” And he did. At the end,
the chef turned to him with a trace of hostility in his voice and said,
“You never told me you were a preacher. What kind of church do
you belong to?” Campolo replied, “I belong to a church that
throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.”

How
the lady the party was thrown for responded in the longer term we
don’t get to know. It would all fit nicely with today’s
readings if we were told that she turned her life around and now works
for some good cause or other. But like I said earlier real faith in
real lives is never that cut and dried.

Which
of our readings would we relate the events in the Diner to? Well you
can sense that there’s certainly an invitation here, this lady
would not forget the motivation of the person who threw the party for
her, to share the love of Christ. We heard Isaiah tell of God’s
earlier invitation thrown wide open to all Israelites in exile, not
just those of a Davidic line. Our forgiving God calls the Israelites in
exile to turn to him ‘for he will freely pardon’.

Later
in Isaiah and also in Luke (4:18 -19) God invites those who are
thirsty, hungry, hurting, grieving, imprisoned, captive, slaves and
free alike to come in response to the invitation. For those who respond
and accept the invitation to return to God there is reason for great
rejoicing which all nature celebrates even ‘the trees of the
field will clap their hands’.

It
could also be interpreted that Campolo was sowing generously. The gift
of Christ, the indescribable gift Paul talks of to the Corinthians is
something he wants to share despite the fact that the diner can’t
have been the most comfortable or the safest place to be at 3.30 in the
morning. What if the tabloids had photographed him with all these women
and got the wrong idea?

Both
readings remind us of Gods abundant grace. I’m sure I’m not
alone in feeling down at times, it can seem that the world is full of
injustice, oppression and violence a view reinforced by some of the
people we encounter. But whilst this is true for some it cannot
overcome the grace which God has shown us. I remind myself to try and
be aware of all he continues to give us. It’s important that we
don’t let the sad things in life dominate to the extent that they
obscure Gods gifts around us.

Perhaps
we need to ask ourselves whether we let the graffiti on the wall spoil
our enjoyment of the glorious autumn colours starting to emerge. When
we sit in the garden or go for a walk is it traffic and aircraft noise
which fills our ears or are we able to hear the bird song. Does anti
social behaviour shape the way we relate to others or can we recognise
the miracle that almost all of millions of people crushed together in
tin boxes commuting to and from London everyday behave in a civilised
way to each other.

If
we can recognise Gods grace among us then our hearts are exposed to his
love and we cannot fail to respond. Paul encouraged the church in
Corinth to respond generously as he sent Titus and others to complete
the collection for poor believers in Jerusalem.

This
was not a TV evangelist saying give me £1 and God will repay you
with £10 but a situation where resources were to be shared with
those in need and once equipped to do so they would share their harvest
with others. It’s about understanding their giving as sowing
seeds for a better future, not simply about sacrificial giving.

If
we can recognise Gods grace at work among us and respond to this with
generosity then there’s real hope that our actions will be sowing
the seeds which could lead to a better harvest in the future.

Let
me begin with a question. Don’t worry. You don’t have to
answer it out loud, but I’d like you to ask yourself this. What
was today’s gospel reading? The one I’ve just read.

I
wonder how many of you have just said to yourself – “it was
the story of the rich man and Lazarus”. It sounds like a sensible
answer, but actually you’re wrong. It wasn’t the story of
the rich man and Lazarus; it was the story of Jesus telling the story
of the rich man and Lazarus, and that makes all the difference.

It
started “Jesus told this parable to those among the Pharisees who
loved money…” It set the scene before it plunged into the
action. That’s because it really matters who the audience is for
this story Jesus tells.

Imagine
a bunch of poor people hearing this story, destitute people like
Lazarus. What is it going to mean to them? They are going to hear a
great shout of deliverance and hope. Things may be grim at the moment,
but God will make it right in the end, the rich will get their
come-uppance and the poor will get their reward.Rich
people hearing it will get a very different message, though - a rather
frightening message, frankly, something to make them sit up and take
notice. So
who is the audience? Luke is very specific. Rich people, but not
just any rich people, rich Pharisees, or ones who’d like to be
rich. The detail is far too specific for it not to matter.
To understand why it matters, though, we need to know a bit about the
Pharisees.

The
Pharisees were a religious movement in Judaism that had grown up in the
couple of centuries before Jesus, and their big thing was the Bible.
They loved the scriptures – the law and the prophets – what
Christians would now call the Old Testament. They loved to read them.
They loved to debate them. Know these words, they taught, live them
out. But despite their claim to be immersed in the word of God their
reading of it was to say the least, a partial one. Some of them had
become convinced, it seems, that wealth and health were a sign of
God’s blessing, and that poverty and sickness were a sign of his
wrath, and that’s not really an accurate picture at all. To be
sure the Bible has nothing against material things. God makes the world
full of them and proclaims them to be very good. He loves to give lands
flowing with milk and honey, vines, fig trees, abundant crops. But the
Bible doesn’t say that personal wealth is a sign of individual
virtue, or that poverty is a sign of individual wickedness.Far
from it. In fact it lays on the rich a serious responsibility to care
for the poor, and more than that, to organise society so that poverty
can’t take a hold on it. Don’t
cut the wheat right up to the edges of the field, it says. Leave what
grows there for those who have no fields of their own. Don’t go
over a field twice to make sure you’ve reaped it all. Be a bit
inefficient, so that others can take the left-overs. Imagine trying to
sell that idea to a big corporation today! Don’t
work 24/7 – and don’t make others work 24/7 either –
everyone must take a break once a week on the Sabbath. Don’t lend
money at interest, making money out of someone else’s need.
Don’t add field to field, house to house – return land
every fifty years to its original owners.

The
prophet Amos puts it in no uncertain terms in today’s Old
Testament reading. Lounging around on beds of ivory, feasting,
drinking, singing, when others are facing ruin - these aren’t
signs that God has blessed you. They are signs that you have completely
lost the plot, and sooner or later you will be brought down to earth
with a bump.

So,
back to these money-loving Pharisees that Jesus is talking to. If they
seriously call themselves Pharisees, students of the Bible, people who
are immersed in God’s law and determined to keep his
commandments, how can they chase after money for themselves? A
money-loving Pharisee ought to be a contradiction in terms. If they are
serious about God’s law they should be seeking instead to make
sure that all have a share of the good things God gives.

But
they don’t seem to have got it.So Jesus tells them a story about
someone else who can’t seem to see what is right in front of him.

There
was this rich man, he says, with a wardrobe full of designer clothes
and so much food that the table could hardly hold it, and at his gate
lay a poor man, covered in sores, who would have been glad of the
scraps - if he’d have been given them - which he wasn’t.
And yet the rich man did nothing. It was as if he didn’t even see
the poor man at all. He must have had to step over him every time he
went in and out – he was right there at the gates. But as far as
the rich man was concerned he just didn’t exist. Beggar? What
beggar? I don’t see any beggar.But
when they both die, suddenly the rich man’s eyesight –
which had seemed so deficient in life - is miraculously made sharp.
Despite the fact that there is a great chasm between them he can see
Lazarus as clear as day, sitting all the way up there by
Abraham’s side. He even knows his name now. Unfortunately, says
the story, it is too little too late.

We
need to be clear, by the way, about this story. It is just that, a
story. It’s not a theological guide to the afterlife. Scholars
have found similar folktales across many cultures in the ancient Middle
East. It’s a bit like those jokes we tell about St Peter and the
Pearly Gates. They aren’t meant to tell you anything serious
about what life after death is like. They are meant, rather, to
highlight the absurdities of life before death, the daft things we do
in the here and now. This story too, tells us a lot but none of it is
really about heaven and hell.

So
what does it tell us. It tells us that doing right really isn’t
that complicated. There’s no hidden secret, no code to crack. We
already know what we need to know. It’s all about love really
– nothing more and nothing less. The rich man begs Abraham to
send someone to warn his brothers to change their ways. But Abraham is
clear. If they haven’t seen the truth already – with all
the law and the prophets shouting it at them - even someone rising from
the dead will make no difference. As one commentator I read put it.
“They’ve already had a whole Bibleful of telegrams; they
should get them out of the wastebasket and try reading them.”Open
your eyes to the people at your gates, this story says, the issues that
are lying in your path, the things you fall over when you go out. Stop
wasting time and energy building ever more elaborate bridges and
tunnels and by-passes to get us over or under or around the
inconvenient truths and pesky problems.

The
Lazaruses we need to notice may be the utterly destitute, as here
– those in the third world who stare at us from the disaster
relief posters. But they may come in other forms too. They may be the
migrant workers on low wages in poor conditions who bring in our
harvest – the harvest we shall celebrate next week. They may be
those in our midst who suffer from discrimination, abuse or loneliness.
They may be those within our own families who need our love and care,
but who we are too busy to give time to because we are chasing our own
interests. Sometimes the Lazarus we need to pay attention to is within
us. I’ve met countless people in my ministry who know that they
have problems with alcohol or drugs, or anger, or unresolved grief or
bitterness. But rather than face those problems, they just carry on as
they are getting deeper and deeper into trouble and misery. Just like
the rich man, it is often not until we have found ourselves in a hell
of our own making – hitting rock bottom - that we are able to
lift up our eyes and see clearly, and by that time a great deal of
damage may have been done, damage that can’t always be undone.
Neglect those who are vulnerable in society and, in the end you will
have social unrest that will hurt everyone. Neglect your family and you
will end up lonely and unsupported and leaving a legacy of hurt for the
next generation. Neglect your own failings and weaknesses and they will
multiply until they drown you.

It’s
not complicated – just a matter of seeing what is there. But it
is challenging, painful, life-changing to deal with these things.
That’s why we don’t do it. If the rich man helps Lazarus,
what next? Perhaps he’ll be swamped by needy people. Perhaps
they’ll start to challenge him, asking why he has so much and
they have so little? Perhaps he will start to wonder himself. Perhaps
his friends will stop wanting to call round – the place is full
of beggars, who wants to share a dinner party with them? Perhaps they
will stop inviting him to their homes – he’s gone a bit
funny in the head, after all. Perhaps he’ll lose his seat on the
town council or the local businessman’s club – he’s
bringing the whole place into disrepute, challenging the economic
system that produced his wealth. Acknowledging
our Lazaruses will mean change, loss, sacrifice. But not acknowledging
them, as Jesus points out, in the end will lead to far greater disaster.

I
said at the beginning that it was really important to know who the
audience for this story was. What if that audience is us? How do we
hear it? Who or what is the Lazarus that we try to avoid noticing, the
issue that we need to address, the person we need to care for? And what
is it we should be doing today, now, while there is time both for us,
and for our Lazaruses, to find the healing we all need?Amen

Having a child changes your life. Any parent here will affirm that. Of
course, you know that before you have them. You can read up the details
in any good childcare book. You can look at friends and relatives who
have just become parents. Sleepless nights, dirty nappies, a truckload
of stuff to buy. Of course children change your life. But the reality
of that change doesn’t usually hit you until the moment when you
hold your own child in your arms. Suddenly you realise how fragile this
baby is, and how dependent on you, and how dangerous the world is, and
how unprepared you really are for the job. You realise how fierce and
how desperate love can feel. This isn’t just going to be about
the cost of nappies or having to give up the spare room to be a
nursery. It’s about having your life torn open to make room for a
whole new human being. Children can bring out the best in us, unlocking
a capacity for love and wonder, courage and a new sense of
responsibility. But they can also bring out the worst in us. The sheer
exhaustion of colicky nights or toddler tantrums or sibling battles can
reduce the most sorted-out parent to a complete wreck, gibbering with
incoherent fury.

Children change you. But our Gospel reading today reminds us that
children don’t just change their parents; they change us all. And
that potential to change the world isn’t just limited to their
early years, but happens throughout their lives. “You are the
salt of the earth” says Jesus to his followers. “You are
the light of the world”. Who is he talking to? His followers are
a motley bunch of ordinary men and women from the backwater Galilean
towns of Northern Israel. We know there were a few fishermen, and a
tax-collector, but the rest are a mystery – probably just small
scale traders or artisans, peasant farmers and housewives. I’m
sure if there were any celebrities we’d have been told so. And
yet, Jesus says, these ordinary people will be salt and light –
two of the most important commodities in the ancient world.
Salt was vital. It was an antiseptic, used to treat wounds. But more
important than that it was a preservative. Salting was one of the most
important ways of preserving food before canning and freezing were
invented. It kept meat, fish and vegetables from going bad so you had
something to eat in the hungry months when harvest time was long past.
Salt could be the difference between life and death, starvation and
plenty.

And light is something we often take for granted now – a flick of
a switch and all is bright. But it wasn’t always so. Our
ancestors knew the difference it made to them to be able to work, cook,
eat, socialise and travel after sunset. One little candle or lamp could
open up all sorts of new possibilities.

Salt and light – simple technology, but life changing for those
who had them. World changing too, because with food preserved in the
larder, and light to see by after the day’s end you had time to
do more than simply subsist. You could invent and learn and grow.

You – said Jesus to the ordinary people who gathered around him
– you are as important as that. You can transform the lives of
those around you just like salt and light. My guess is that most of
them looked at each other in amazement. “What, us?! What
difference can we make? We’re not kings or generals or even great
teachers.” They’ve come to Jesus to learn.
They’ve come to him because they feel needy – they want
help, healing, forgiveness. But here he is talking about them as if
they are some sort of heroes or teachers or healers themselves. How can
that be?

But Jesus was right. They do change the world, that little band of
ordinary people, as they eventually travel out into their communities
with his message of hope. If it wasn’t for them, we
wouldn’t be here today. And what Jesus said is just as true of
each of us. We may feel small – as small as baby Harry. We may
feel helpless or ignorant – knowing as little as baby Harry does
right now. But just as little Harry changes the world simply by being
here, so each of us changes the world too. We may have a large circle
of influence or a small one, but we will make a difference to someone.
The choice we have to make is what that difference will be. We can be
that essential salt that brings goodness and flavour to their lives or
we can settle for bland apathy that leaves evil unchallenged, wrongs
unrighted. We can make other people’s lives brighter, make it
easier for them to find their way, or we can deny them the light that
would help them to grow, by keeping our own light under a basket,
strictly for ourselves.

In the Old Testament reading the prophet Amos challenges the people
around him to think about the effect they are having on others. They
are far from being salt and light, in fact their selfish and
thoughtless actions – aimed only at enriching themselves –
are damaging those who were most vulnerable in their society. They
hurry through the festivals of Sabbath and new moon – the times
when people could take time off to rest and be with their families
– so that they could get back to work. They cheat at the market
using false scales and inflating prices. They buy and sell people like
cheap commodities, and won’t even let them gather the leftover
wheat from the fields. They sell it off to maximise their profits
instead. It is a sadly modern picture. Workers denied proper rest,
sharp trading practices that skate around the edge of legality, cheap
goods made in sweat shops by people who are little more than slaves.
All these things happen today, and they will continue to happen as long
as we manage to convince ourselves that what we do doesn’t really
matter, as long as we fail to see the way in which each of us changes
the world, for good or ill as we act, or refuse to act, for good. We
think we are insignificant, but actually this ocean of injustice is
made up of many tiny drops of water, the individual careless decisions
we make that we think are too small to count.

We are not neutral observers of the world say these two readings to us.
Life isn’t a spectator sport. We make it what it is for us and
for others.

The baptism we are about to do has many meanings. It is about
God’s declaration of his unconditional love for Harry. It is
about Harry’s place in the family of the church. But it is also a
reminder of God’s calling to him and to each of us to make a
difference for good. It is a reminder to each of us of our significance
in the world. One of the many symbols I will use during this Baptism is
oil. In fact I shall anoint Harry with oil twice. Before the baptism
I’ll anoint him with olive oil – it was used in the ancient
world as a preparation for washing – a soap substitute to loosen
the dirt and a sign of welcome in the dusty heat of the Middle East.
But after the baptism I’ll anoint Harry a second time, and this
I’ll use the oil of chrism. (pass it round the congregation) Oil
of chrism is olive oil scented with frankincense. It is the oil used to
anoint monarchs when they are crowned, and priests at their ordination,
when they begin their ministry. It is oil, in other words, which is
used to say that someone is starting an important job, that they have
work to do which others will notice. You can smell when someone has
been anointed with chrism oil. The scent of them spreads out into the
world.

When I anoint Harry I’ll be reminding him, and us, that what he
does will makes a difference. He is not called to slip through the
world anonymously, but to be salt and light, with an impact for good
that spreads beyond his own life to the lives of others, like a sweet
scent. And just as he is called to change the world for good, so
are we all.
Amen

The
story we heard from the Old Testament tonight isn’t an easy one
for us to get our heads around. This angry destructive God isn’t
the one we want to hear about. It’s all a bit embarrassing. Of
course, like all of the Bible it reflects the time it was written, but
all the same…it’s a bit much! But the
truth is that even in ancient times this story would have been a bit
shocking. Not because God was angry –the gods of ancient
civilisations were all like that – they’d destroy you as
soon as look at you if they happened to feel like it. What would have
surprised people in ancient times was its ending. “And the Lord
changed his mind…” He didn’t change it because Moses
bribed him. He didn’t change it because it suited some capricious
whim of his own. He changed it because Moses reminded him of his
ancient relationship with these people. “You know you love us
really, God… don’t do it.” “And the Lord
changed his mind…”Frankly,
it seems a bit weak. A God whose will can be altered by an appeal to
nothing more than love? What kind of God is this? Not one like the gods
of the nations around Israel. People wanted gods who were
powerful, decisive, able to force their will through, no matter what
– the same qualities they looked for in military and national
leaders, the same things people still tend to look for. Most people
want to follow someone won’t too easily back down, or be
persuaded to change their mind, someone who at least looks as if they
know what they are doing, (even if they don’t) not someone
who flip-flops.So,
this God who changes his mind must have been a bit of a struggle for
people to accept. And yet it is the God we meet over and over in the
pages of the Old Testament– a God for whom love always trumped
anger. He had meant to destroy the world in the times of Noah,
but he couldn’t quite bring himself too. His people continually
got themselves in trouble – in slavery in Egypt, in exile in
Babylon. Any sensible god would have left them to their fate. The
prophets often threaten that he will too. But he always relents,
changes his mind, sticks with them.The
Scribes and the Pharisees in today’s reading struggle with this
picture of God too. They’d rather have a God who takes a hard
line, who is ruthless in his insistence on holiness, rather than one
who forgives people at the drop of a hat. How can you know where you
stood with a changeable, persuadable God, and more importantly, how can
you know where others stand – whether they are in or out?
They were aghast that Jesus accepted the apparent no-hopers who flocked
to him, and proclaimed that God accepted. Surely this couldn’t be
right! But the
famous parables – the lost sheep and the lost coin –
restate those Old Testament acts of unexpected mercy. God doesn’t
stand on dignity. He will go to any lengths, even looking weak or
ridiculous in the eyes of others, if it will bring home the lost, heal
the hurting. Who would abandon 99 good sheep in the wilderness to
rescue one that is lost? Who would throw a party to celebrate finding a
coin, when the party probably cost more than the coin. But this is
their God, the God of Moses, the God who changes his mind, goes out of
his way, sends his son to die like a criminal for them. And if
this is how God is, says Jesus – able to change when he needs to,
not worried about what people think of him - surely we should be the
same. The Greek word for “changing your mind” is
metanoia, but it is more often translated in the New Testament as
“repentance”, and it’s vital. If you
can’t change your mind, how can you change anything else? “The
Lord changed his mind…” I wonder whether tonight, there
are things we need to change our minds about. Ways of doing things,
ways of thinking, old feuds or prejudices we have stubbornly stuck to
because we don’t want to look like ditherers, we don’t want
to admit that we might have got it wrong, or that there is a better
way. It’s a hard thing to do, to repent, to change tack, but
God’s example shows us that true power includes the ability to
change when you need to. The old Shaker song, Simple Gifts, puts it
like this. “When true simplicity is gained, to bend and to bow we
shan’t be ashamed. To turn, turn will be our delight, till by
turning, turning we come round right.” As we
reflect in the silence, let’s ask God to call us to the repentance, the
change of mind that truly heals. Amen

Lord, give
us courage and honesty to face the questions you put before us. Amen.

Vote for
me. I’ll bring you ludicrous working hours, low wages; you’ll be
ridiculed,
lack personal security and could face unfair imprisonment, possibly
even a
painful death. Who wants to join my party? Not words likely to flow
from the
lips of any campaigning politician.

Jesus urges
us to think about the cost of true faith in him and the potential
consequences
of true discipleship in the same way that we should plan a construction
project
to see it through to the end or consider action against others knowing
what we
will be letting ourselves in for. He doesn’t try to hide the fact that
following him will have a cost, it is not an easy option and sacrifices
will
have to be made.

I’m a lot
more at home with the Jesus who heals, tells lively parables, cleverly
rebukes
pompous religious leaders and exudes warmth and sympathy to those in
need.

I’m
disturbed by Jesus words, they challenge me with questions I’d rather
not face
up to ‘…If anyone does not hate his father and mother, his wife and
children,
his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my
disciple.’
‘In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has
cannot be
my disciple.’ He’s hardly trying to sweet talk us into following him
and
doesn’t seem much of a salesman does he? It all seems a lot more
palatable when
we hear words which are gentle and offer comfort.

The trouble
is that he ‘walks the talk’ and it’s hard to ignore someone who clearly
understands the cost of being God’s servant. I see it as a call to face
up to
what Christ really means. A call to recognise our priorities and not to
put off
clear thought on this in the way we may delay confronting other issues
that
disturb us like facing up to a health or relationship problem in the
false hope
that they will resolve themselves.

So if you
don’t get on with your family are you a step closer to being a disciple
than
those of us who love them? I don’t think so. The problem is thrown up
by the
word hate. We understand hate to mean loathing. I guess that the girl
in the
news this week who killed her sister in a rage must have hated her for
at least
a while. We know none of this is the way of Christ.

What is
clear though is that Christ is to be put before even the things we
love, our
family, our home, our security. For many it is not necessary to leave
our
family and give up our home but it’s worth thinking whether we would be
prepared to do so if we felt Christ was calling us to. It’s a really
searching
question and few of us could respond with ‘count me in’ without deep
consideration of what we are being asked to do.

When I was
in my early twenties I felt pleased with myself for buying, or more
accurately,
securing a mortgage on, my first house. When an Aussie surf dude friend
of mine
came to stay he saw it rather differently. His words have remained with
me ever
since’ Oh man I feel so sorry for you losing your freedom with this
great mill
stone around your neck.’ To him it was horrible to have
responsibilities that
could prevent you from hopping on a plane to pursue the sun, or a wave.

A question
worth considering is have our homes, financial security and lifestyle
become
such an important part of our identity that Jesus is pushed to the
margins or can
Gods love in Christ still be the most important thing to us?

Instead of
offering low wages, prison and death to followers what if a leader we
could
believe in gathered us to tell of an isolated place where there’s
oppression,
injustice and an urgent need for food and medical supplies. The leader
needs
our support to bring relief to these poor people. If we’re prepared to
go it
will mean a long journey on foot with no room for comforts or
unnecessary
baggage. Spend time with those you love now because it’s unlikely we’ll
all
make it back.

It’s still
not an attractive proposition but we could make sense of it and see the
risks
have a purpose for good.

The love of
God is still the primary motivation for many today who risk everything
to serve
others in bringing relief to the poor, standing up for the oppressed
and facing
persecution for their faith.

This church
has links with Ruth and Saulo De Barros, Saulo is now bishop of the
Anglican
Diocese in the Amazons.

Saulo
cited the case of the American nun Dorothy Stang, who received death
threats
and was then murdered in February 2005, in Anapu, a city in the
Amazonian
rainforest, after speaking out against local land barons.

He continued: ‘Despite being threatened, you have to keep going. I
would prefer
my son and daughter to think of me as someone who died rather than just
sat in
a church. Once you have opened your eyes to it you can’t turn your
back. We
live in an unequal world; you see how many people are suffering and you
think
what right have I to ignore their plight.’

He
added: ‘Friends say “you have done enough, you can’t change the world”,
but if
everyone thought like that where would we be?’

Inspiration
like this gives an insight into the sort of religion Jesus is offering.
It doesn’t
offer an insurance policy or a nice warm feeling inside but relates
closely to
all that is happening around us. There will constantly be new
challenges to
face if we commit ourselves to discipleship.

We
heard almost all of Paul’s short letter to Philemon. It seems likely
that
Philemon became a Christian after hearing Paul preach in Ephesus and
Paul respected him as a man who
had reacted to the gospel message with love and generosity.

Like
most men of means Philemon had slaves, it seemed as natural to him as a
car or
TV is to us today. However, one of his slaves had run away, then a
capital
offence. The slave seems to have met Paul in Ephesus where he became a
Christian and
looked after Paul in prison. However Paul couldn’t delay the need to
send the
slave Onesimus (Own-ee-si-mus) back but gently asked Philemon to accept
him without
penalty, even to set him free whilst emphasizing that the final
decision was
his. Wouldn’t you hate a situation like this; your friends would think
you’d
gone mad. Faced with a modern equivalent newspapers would have a field
day
pointing out what sort of message does this send out to slaves! Run
away and
get rewarded with freedom, the whole system could break down!

Paul
knew all this yet found his priority in the gospel message and its need
to
change real lives and influence difficult decisions that have to be
taken. The
partnership Paul and Philemon have in the gospel is more important than
observing the norms of society and offers the possibility that when a
few
people hold to these values, new things can be achieved. It’s one of
those
moments when we don’t just hear the gospel but the opportunity to live
it
stares us in the face.

We
are not told whether Philemon forgives Onesimus though whatever he did
would
have been witnessed by those in his house church so he was certainly
under the
microscope on this one. I think most of us would expect that Paul’s
letter did
the trick though it would have taken a great deal of self control by
Philemon not
to make Onesimus feel even a little bit guilty.

Philemon
and Onesimus must learn to accept each other because Paul loves them
both and,
even more, so does God.

I
mentioned earlier that Jesus challenge to follow him is a difficult one
to face
up to, disturbing and a bit frightening at times. Here the challenge
becomes reality;
turn your world upside down Philemon. You’ll need to take a risk and
may be
hated by some for doing so, this could prove costly.

Could
we be still be influenced by Paul’s plea today and see every person as
a beloved
brother or sister or is true discipleship just too risky for us?

Lord, give
us courage and honesty to face the questions you put before us. Amen.

Amen

2nd
September 2007 Trinity 13 EvensongIsaiah
33.13-22, John 3. 22-36“He
must increase but I must decrease” says John the Baptist, when
his followers come to tell him that Jesus and his disciples are
baptising nearby, and that the crowds that once flocked to John are
going on to this new preacher instead.“He
must increase but I must decrease”. A simple statement, passing
on the baton of ministry from John to Jesus. If all I wanted to do was
to give you a pious message I could simply say, “see how humble
John is – we should all be like that” and sit down. But I
think that to do that would be to gloss over the dilemmas that most of
us have when it comes to that most elusive of virtues – humility.
If
we’re honest, what we hope will pass for humility is often no
more than a cover up. Most of us find it very hard to let someone else
surpass us, to see someone else managing to do something we would have
longed to do, but couldn’t. Jealousy lurks just beneath the
surface, ready to destroy our best intentions to be supportive to
others. We conceal that jealousy by trying to look unassuming and
modest. “I’ll just sit here in the corner, don’t mind
me…” we say. “I didn’t really want that
promotion, that plum job anyway, I’m so glad that you have got it
instead of me – couldn’t have gone to a better
person…” It sounds good, but we’re often just
playing “humbler than thou”, covering up our own longings
while inwardly seething. “He must increase but I must
decrease”? Huh – I bet… The model for this
sort of false humility isn’t John the Baptist; it is
Dickens’s Uriah Heep, who, while being “ever so
‘umble” is actually plotting the downfall of those he fawns
on.And
sometimes what we think of as humility can really just be lack of
self-confidence. The person who will never put themselves forward,
never stand up for themselves, isn’t being humble, they have
simply lost, or never had, any sense that they are worthwhile in their
own right. It’s something I’ve often seen in people
who’ve been abused or put down constantly while they’ve
been growing up. If you are told you’re stupid and useless, or
treated with cruelty or disdain, you’ll find it hard to believe
in yourself, hard to take up the space in the world that is rightfully
yours. It’s no accident that often it is those who have had least
power in our society – women, children, the poor –
who’ve had the virtue of humility preached at them most
consistently. It can be very convenient for those who want to hang on
to power if others can be persuaded to shrink into a corner. But
shrinking into a corner isn’t humility either and in the end it
does no one any good.Humility
is a complex issue. It is a dangerous concept, easily abused. “He
must increase, but I must decrease.” Did John really mean it? Did he
really say it at all? Perhaps we wonder.The
enigmatic figure of John the Baptist has, in fact, been the object of
much argument almost from the beginning. The Gospel picture of him, as
a humble itinerant preacher whose sole mission was to “prepare
the way of the Lord” pointing away from himself and towards Jesus
is one that some people dispute. They see the hand of the editor in
this story as it is recorded in the Gospels. We know that there were
quite a few groups of people in the early days of Christianity who
still thought of themselves as John’s followers rather than
Jesus’. In the book of Acts St Paul meets some of them in far off
Ephesus. What better way to convince them to transfer their allegiance
than to say that John himself had thought Jesus was the real deal
– the one he’d been waiting for? Sceptics suggest that the
church simply put these words into John’s mouth. Could that be
the case? Who knows? There is only, to the best of my knowledge,
one organised group of people who still claim to be genuine descendents
of John’s original followers, one group who weren’t
persuaded at that early stage. They are the Mandeans. There are
about 20,000 of them, and they are concentrated in Iraq and Iran. They
still revere John, and believe that Jesus perverted his message. The
Gospel picture of John is a Christian conspiracy, they say, to make it
look as if John himself thought Jesus should supercede him. Their
worship features ritual washing – water is central to their
religious life, so it seems likely that their claims to go right back
to John might well be true. But there’s no way of knowing if they
are right to hang onto that first allegiance, right in their suspicions
of the early ChristiansThis
could be a bit of early Christian propaganda, but equally it could be
that John’s disciples just didn’t want to believe that they
needed to move on, and that he was telling them this himself. “He
must increase but I must decrease”. Can we believe John really
said this? Or do we, like his disciples here, feel that he must surely
have really wanted to hang onto power and authority? We don’t
know, but the fact that we are suspicious tells us something important.
Our doubts about them can’t be based on historical evidence,
because we haven’t got any. If they sound unlikely to us it is
only because we don’t expect leaders to behave like this, to give
up power willingly. We don’t expect to find genuine humility, and
we distrust it when we do see it. “It can’t be
so” we think. We look at those who seem to be humble and wonder
what they have to hide, what is wrong with them, what are they really
after…?” And if we doubt it in others, we will also find
it hard to attain for ourselves. Is
genuine humility possible? Personally I would say that it is. I have
met genuinely humble people – humble in the sense that they seem
to have nothing to prove, nothing they need to impress you with. They
are at ease with themselves and with others. They aren’t usually
the kind of people who make the headlines – that goes with the
territory of humility, I suppose – but you know them when you
meet them. I think of an elderly reader in a former parish of mine who
seemed to have endless love for others, giving time and attention
without ever seeming to be depleted by it. I think of a wise counsellor
I knew who never seemed to need to come up with some quick solution in
order to look clever. He didn’t mind stating the obvious or
suggesting something that was instantly rejected. He trusted those he
was talking to, rather than needing to make them trust him. He
didn’t need confirmation that he was right to bolster his own
ego. It made talking to him much easier. Perhaps you can think of
people like this too. How did they learn this humility? The common
factor seems to me to be their trust in God’s love – not a
love that is just for them, or a love they have strived to earn in some
way, and which they must struggle to hang onto, but a love that is just
there, a love that is for everyone, like the ground beneath their feet.
Isaiah,
in the first reading talked of Jerusalem, as “a quiet habitation,
an immovable tent, whose stakes will never be pulled up, and none of
whose ropes will be broken. True humility, it seems to me, is to live
in a place like that, an immoveable tent, with unbreakable ropes. He
talks of knowing God as a “broad river” not a set of
whitewater rapids in rocky ravine full of hidden dangers which is as
likely to kill you as to carry you through. The
root of the word humility is, of course, the same as the word humus. It
is all to do with the earth. Humble people are down to earth, have
their feet on the ground. Humility grows when you realise that, just as
you can’t fall off the ground, neither can you fall out of
God’s love. You no longer have to fear failure, or cling to
success, because God knows you – with all your limitations
– and loves you still. Did
John the Baptist really say the words attributed to him? Did he really
have that assurance that leads to humility? I don’t know, but I
hope so, because I can’t think of any gift that would have
brought him more peace and courage as he faced that squalid, sordid,
apparently pointless death at Herod’s hands. Whatever
the historical truth, however, I think it is worth pondering his words
honestly, and the suspicious reactions we and others have had to them.
John’s words can help us see our worst fears about ourselves;
that we are self-deluding, hopelessly duplicitous people, full of
hidden agendas and mixed motives – people who could never really
let ourselves decrease so that others increase. But they can also
reveal to us our best hopes; that genuine humility is possible; that we
can find the peace which comes from surrendering our fantasies about
ourselves to God’s mercy; that we can learn to rest on the
bedrock of his acceptance; that we can get beyond our anxious striving
to prove ourselves, and find our true home in the quiet habitation of
his love.Amen

Ever
wished the ground would open up and swallow you? Most of us have. That
moment when you realise you have committed some awful social gaffe.
Turning up at the fancy dress party, only to find that it isn’t
fancy dress after all… Tripping over a sixpence and falling flat
on your face in front of the very person you were trying to
impress…Breaking the priceless vase that has been in your
host’s family for centuries…

Most
of us have some story to tell – or rather one that wild horses
wouldn’t drag from us, but which our best friends will make sure
finds its way straight to Youtube or You’ve been framed if they
get the chance!

Social
embarrassment is nothing new, though. That’s clear from the
Gospel reading we’ve just heard. Imagine what it would be like,
said Jesus, to swan into a posh banquet and sit at the top table, only
to be unceremoniously slung off it when your host appears, because it
was never meant for you. Having to get up, and walk down to the lowest
place with everyone’s eyes on you. Most of us would rather die.
Far better to choose a seat somewhere inconspicuous and find yourself
promoted.

Jesus’
words are two thousand years old, but we can still understand perfectly
well what he is talking about. He knew, just as we all do that finding
your place in the pecking order of your society is always fraught with
difficulty. There are a few people who genuinely seem to have an
effortless belief in their own superiority. Leona Helmsley died this
week. This super rich woman was imprisoned in the US once for tax
evasion. This seems to have come as a huge surprise to her. She is
famously reputed to have said that “only the little people pay
taxes!” But self-confidence like that is rare – and as it
turned out in her case, completely misplaced.

Many
more people, though, think less of themselves than they should. Some
constantly apologise for themselves as if they shouldn’t take up
space in the world at all. Others act big because they feel small,
throwing their weight around in an attempt to cover up the weaknesses
they hope won’t be noticed. I’m sure its no accident that
gang culture thrives among young people who don’t seem to have
much else to make them feel good or hopeful about their lives.
Disrespect is the number one crime, it seems, to those in these gangs.
A look, a comment that implies they are anything less than kings of the
world meets with a savage response. When egos are fragile it
doesn’t take much to threaten them. The problem isn’t just
with the gang members, though, or inner city communities. We’re
all involved in setting criteria for success and failure in our
society. There
are a whole range of markers we use. The amount of money you have, your
family background, educational achievement, the car you drive,
the clothes you wear, the house you live in, how fit you are, how good
at sports. Different people might rank these things differently, but
they are the kind of things which, in the eyes of our society, send out
the message that you have made it, or that you haven’t, that you
are entitled to sit on the top table of life, or that you should skulk
in the doorway, afraid to show your face for fear of being turned away.
Celebrity itself – being famous, no matter what for – often
seems to be enough these days to mark you out as someone who counts. A
brief appearance on a reality TV show and you’ve made it,
although many who achieve fame this way find that it’s not all
it’s cracked out to be.

In
a moment we shall be baptising Heather. She’s right at the
beginning of her life. What will she become, I wonder? Will she be
famous, or will her life be a quiet, private one? We don’t know.
Will she be rich? Will she be clever, with lots of letters after her
name? All those markers of success and failure that our society sets
such store by – how will she measure up to them? We don’t
know. I’m sure her family and friends, and all of us, hope for
the very best for her. It would be strange if we didn’t. But I
also hope that she learns not to set too much store by these sorts of
things, because if she places too much emphasis on them she is bound to
be disappointed sooner or later. However much she achieves she will
find – because she is a fallible human living among other
fallible humans – that things sometimes go wrong. They
don’t turn out the way she planned or we hoped. No one can win
all the time. Even if she climbs to the very top of the greasy pole of
worldly achievement, she won’t be able to stay there forever.

If
she learns to measure her worth by such fragile things as wealth, fame
or ability, there is bound to be trouble. And that’s why this
ancient service of baptism matters. Baptism is about a lot of things
– joining the church, giving thanks for new life, committing
ourselves to supporting Heather spiritually as she grows – but at
its heart is one wonderful, awesome message. It’s the message
that whatever happens in her life, God has already declared her to be a
winner in his eyes. Before she takes her first steps on the rat race
that life often seems to be, she has already got all the approval she
really needs, all the affirmation that really counts. Baptism is a
declaration of God’s love for Heather. Whatever she becomes, or
fails to become, it says, in God’s eyes she is already infinitely
precious – there has never been anyone like her, and there never
will be anyone like her, and as our first reading says, he will never
fail her or forsake her.

That’s
true of every one – baptised or not – but in baptism she,
and we, hear that promise loud and clear. She never needs to wonder
whether she is welcome in the world – she’s part of the
family, entitled to be here. And if things go wrong, the waters of
baptism are a promise that there is forgiveness and a new start, not
just now but always.

Where
does Heather stand in God’s pecking order? Where is the place at
his banquet that he has reserved for her? It is right up there beside
him, on the top table. I pray that her life will be full of happiness
and satisfaction, but most of all I pray that she will never feel the
need to chase after fame to make her feel worthwhile, because she will
know that she is secure in God’s love anyway. I pray that she
will never need to chase after money, because she will know that she is
rich in the things that really matter. I pray that she will never have
to cling to a false status gained by force or manipulation, because she
will know her true status as a child of God, eternally beloved. And I
pray that we will know that this is equally true for us all.Amen

There was a wonderful concert in the Proms season last week. I saw it
on television, but I’d have loved to have seen it live, because
it was absolutely electrifying. It was by a Venezuelan Youth Orchestra
– the Simon Bolivar orchestra. It was full of verve and
musicality. This orchestra was all the more remarkable, though, when
you heard the story behind it. About 30 years ago a Venezuelan
economist called Jose Antonio Abreu, who happened also to be a keen
musician and composer, looked around at the slums of Venezuela’s
cities. They were full of drugs, crime and violence. Young people
growing up there had little chance of being able to walk tall in the
world, to break out of the cycle of deprivation. He knew there was no
magic answer – the problems were too deep rooted - but he
couldn’t just do nothing. So he did the only thing he knew how
to. Music had always meant a lot to him, perhaps it could change others
too. It seemed unlikely – South American street children and
classical music seem poles apart -but he got a few children together,
rounded up some musical instruments and basic tuition and watched to
see what would happen. What happened was phenomenal – way beyond
his expectations. There are now around 250,000 children involved in the
movement he started, known as El Sistema – the system - 90%
come from those shanty towns . There are over 200 orchestras or choirs
all over Venezuela. The National Youth Orchestra is just the tip of a
musical iceberg.

For many of the quarter of a million young people involved El Sistema
is a life-saver and a life-changer. Legner Lacosta, for example, was
living on the streets at the age of 12. By 13 he had a crack cocaine
habit and a gun, and was dealing in drugs. At 15 he was imprisoned in a
young offender’s institute. One day while he was there the Youth
Orchestras Project turned up, and a clarinet was put into his hands.
"When the instruments arrived,” he said “the director told
me there was a clarinet left. I didn't know what it was. I was
fascinated when I saw it. He taught me the first four notes. I played
those four notes all day." He never looked back.
Two years later he was back in the detention centre, but this time he
was there as a visitor, teaching the clarinet to others. This young man
from the back streets who looked as if his life would be over before it
had begun is now in Germany continuing his studies.

El Sistema can tell a quarter of a million stories like that, of street
children, abandoned, abused children, children from overcrowded squalid
housing in areas where it isn’t even safe to take their
instruments home to practice, but children whose lives have been turned
around, not just by music, but by the philosophy that informs this
project; that you can’t write anyone off because of the things
that have happened to them, the place where they were born, the things
they’ve done. Every child has potential. Some – however
unlikely they look – may turn out to be brilliant musicians, such
as those who were playing in the Albert Hall last week. But all have
plentiful gifts to give to others, the capacity to inspire and support
others, to give them something beyond the limited expectations of the
slums to reach for.

There are no orchestras in today’s Gospel reading, but there is a
similar astonishing transformation. A woman, bent double by disease for
eighteen years comes to her local synagogue. Perhaps she was a regular,
or perhaps she had made the effort to come on this day because she knew
Jesus was there. Either way it must have been a struggle. If you
can’t stand upright everything is difficult. Dressing, eating,
shopping, getting around. You can’t see where you are going
– your eyes are fixed on the ground, your horizons literally
lowered. But this woman has more than her physical illness to cope
with. Being bent double means never being able to look others in the
eye. You can’t see them properly. They can’t see you. You
are below their gaze, under their radar, so to speak. For this woman it
meant that soon no one really saw her at all - not as an equal, proper,
real person. She is a nobody to her community.

It is the reaction of the leader of the synagogue that gives this away.
When Jesus heals her all he can do is complain. All he can see is that
Jesus has broken the law. He is full of indignation. He doesn’t
just make one odd, stray, insensitive comment. The Gospel account tells
us “he kept saying to the crowd, “there are six days on
which work should be done…” He goes on and on about it,
and the crowd all nod in agreement. The woman herself was
praising God for her healing, but this blinkered leader and the
synagogue regulars are having none of it.

It is a staggeringly cruel reaction, and it tells us how warped these
people’s world view had become. As Jesus points out, they would
treat their oxen and donkeys better than they would this woman –
she is less than an animal to them. Jesus tells the woman “you
are free from your ailment”, but I don’t think she’s
the sickest person in that synagogue by a long way.

It would be comforting if we could feel that this was all long ago and
far away, that we would be different, but I don’t think we have
to look very hard at our world before we realise that our worldview is
often just as warped. We so easily behave as if some are worth more
than others, and some worth nothing at all. Often, just like this
woman, it is those who are already struggling on whom we load extra
burdens of thoughtlessness or prejudice.

People with disabilities today often still have a hard time. The
disability is bad enough, but their burdens are often made much greater
by the fact that we still live in an environment which for centuries
has been designed around the able bodied. That often means those with
disabilities are counted out – why all these steps in our
churches at the chancel and altar? They aren’t necessary. And
fixed pews, so you can’t fit a wheelchair in where someone wants
to sit... When laws are passed to try to ensure that we do provide
access we moan about political correctness. We see it as red tape
rather than a reminder that there are people whose company we are
missing out on, who have blessings and gifts to give. What does such
grudging acceptance sound like, I wonder , if you are the one in the
wheelchair? It’s not exactly going to make you feel as if your
society values you.

The same is true for those with mental health issues too. They are find
doubly burdened. It’s not just the challenge of the illness but
the stigma they must cope with. Seeking help is tough when you’re
afraid of what people will think. Families, friends, employers may not
understand, may withdraw rather than rallying round. You can easily end
up totally isolated, not because of your illness, but because of other
people’s fears.

Or what about those who find themselves raising children alone? Single
parenthood is hard. I know because I’ve done it. But it is made
much harder when politicians or church leaders make sweeping
pronouncements about the evils of the broken family, which leads, it
seems directly to juvenile delinquency and the collapse of society. My
children have good degrees and a well-developed moral sense, but that
was no thanks to the lazy condemnation we often heard of families like
ours.

Everyone struggles with life at some point. Bad things happen to us
– disease, bereavement, unemployment, family troubles. It is part
of being human. These things can weigh us down, bend us double, just as
much as any physical disease might, but some discover that while they
are down there with their faces in the mud, others have decided that
they don’t count any more as equal human beings. When they try to
stand up straight they find they are straining against burdens of
prejudice and ignorance. It may be the fact that you are black,
or Muslim, or a woman, or gay, or poor, or disabled but someone,
somewhere has decided it is ok to write you off, to blame you for all
the world’s ills, or simply to ignore you, as the synagogue
congregation did to the woman in our Gospel reading today.

For Jesus it was crystal clear. She is a daughter of Abraham, he tells
the crowd. She is an equal member of the family of Israel. He saw her
as she was and nothing, nothing, was more important than helping her to
see that too, so she could stand tall and walk straight not just in
body but in spirit. She’d been bent double for 18 years. Perhaps
the leader of the synagogue thought that one more day would make no
difference. But to Jesus it was an abomination to put keeping the
law – religious respectability – before the needs of one of
God’s own children. It was an abomination even to think of it,
even for twenty four hours. She was here, now. She was in need, now. He
could help her, now, and that was all there was to it, no matter what
it cost him.

Jose Antonio Abreu did something very similar for the children of
Venezuela – he looked beyond the expectations of their society,
beyond the surface, to the truth that they were all of them children of
God as well as children of the slums, and he did what he could, right
then, even if it seemed as if it could never work. It took great vision
to see the potential in these children, and great courage to do
something about it. But as a result Venezuela discovered a quarter of a
million musicians in its inner cities, and brought joy and hope to
those young people whose faces shone with excitement as they played, as
well as to the audience who heard them. What would happen, I wonder, if
we could have that same vision and courage, if we could learn to see
God’s glorious possibilities – for ourselves and for others
– and dare to make them real? What wonderful music might
there be then?
Amen

Do you dream? Scientists tell us that we all do, even if we don’t
remember our dreams. Most of my dreams seem like complete nonsense,
though often very vivid nonsense. Why should I have dreamt that the BBC
were filming an episode of Dr Who in the churchyard last night?
I’ve no idea, but I was relieved to find there were no Daleks
behind the gravestones this morning!

Dreams have puzzled and intrigued us throughout our history. Modern
people tend to talk about them as messages from the subconscious, from
deep within us, previous generations interpreted them as messages from
the spiritual realm – even messages from God. They tell, us, we
believe, things that we almost know, that we need to know, bringing to
the surface images and truths that need our attention.

The Bible is full of dreams and dreamers. Jacob dreamt of a ladder
connecting heaven to earth, with angels going up and down on it. His
son, Joseph, inherited his ability to dream – dreaming his own
dreams and interpreting the dreams of others.

In the New Testament the wise men were warned by an angel in a dream to
take another route home from Bethlehem, and Joseph was told to take his
family to Egypt. Much later, Pilate’s wife dreams of Jesus, and
warns her husband not to condemn him – it’ll just lead to
trouble.

Dreams, and waking visions too, mattered in the ancient world.
Something that came to you without your consciously seeking it seemed
to have more authority than something you’d thought up yourself.
And dreams, like all forms of imaginative activity, could help you see
beyond yourself to new possibilities.

But the Bible also recognised the danger of dreaming. Dreams could be
delusions, wishful thinking. In the Old Testament reading today we hear
God’s verdict on prophets who are using the power of dreams to
mislead people. “I have dreamed, I have dreamed,” they cry.
And what did they dream? They dreamt of peace, prosperity, security
– everything was ok, no one need worry or concern themselves. The
problem was that they were wrong. The armies of the mighty Babylonian
Empire were moving inexorably towards Jerusalem, and soon they would be
conquered. You didn’t need to dream to know that, you just had to
look around you. The people should have been preparing for tough times,
but that was too uncomfortable. Better the soft dream than the hard
reality.

Jesus too, warns his followers against believing what they want to
believe. They think the road is leading to peace and victory, when
actually the cross is on the horizon. Jesus’ message will bring
trouble and division. They need to know that, and count the cost.
You can read the signs in nature, he says. You know when bad weather is
coming then. You need do the same when you look at what the future will
hold for me and for you if you follow me.

Our dreams can still be misleading as well as enlightening. There were
those who dreamed that if Saddam Hussein was toppled the Iraqis would
be able as if by magic to live in peace. It hasn’t turned out
that way – this is a war that was much easier to get into than to
get out of.
We often get sucked into the dream that we can all live as we want to,
consume as we want to, enjoy unlimited economic growth. Who wants
to face the reality that the first weapon against climate change is to
accept that we must be content with less?
We can be led astray by dreams about ourselves too. People are often
encouraged to think they can be anything and do anything if only they
are prepared to dream big enough dreams. I’m all for aiming high
and trying new things, but we have to be careful – not everyone
can be Einstein. I might dream of being a world famous high jumper, but
it ain’t going to happen!
The same idealism can poison our relationships. People look for the man
or woman of their dreams, when all they will ever find is another human
being like themselves – fallible and imperfect. They get married
in dream weddings, all full of romance and fantasy, but what they
actually need to do on their wedding day is be real – about
themselves and the person to whom they are committing themselves.

Dreams, visions, imagination – in their place they are great.
They lead us beyond ourselves. But we need to be on our guard to make
sure we are not simply telling ourselves, or allowing ourselves to be
told, what we want to hear. Reality may be harder to face, but we face
it in the real company of our real God who won’t evaporate like a
dream in the cold light of day. Amen.

The world is
full of faithful people, people who are full of faith. That might not
be your first impression when you look around you, but I am convinced
it is true. It seems to me that everywhere I see people who believe in
things completely without proof and act on those beliefs. We like to
think we are scientific people, but there’s a lot more faith involved
in daily living than we realise.

You have all come here this
morning, for example, believing that there would be a service (and that
it would be worth getting out of bed for!) I know that the notice board
says there will be a service, but why should you trust that? (What if I
didn’t think it was worth getting out of bed for?) Perhaps you think
the Bishop would haul me over the coals if I didn’t turn up. Perhaps –
I hope – you just trust me to do my job. But it was still an act of
faith to come here. You couldn’t be sure.

Many of you will get
up tomorrow and go to work, believing that your employer will pay you
for your labours. They always have so far, but you still have to trust
them. When we go shopping we do so in the faith that what we buy will
do what it says on the tin, so to speak. Often we believe far more than
that – taken in by the advertisers’ claims that our purchases will
change our lives, make us happy, turn our ordinary families into the
shining, smiling paragons of the advertisers’ images. Faith isn’t
always realistic, or founded on reason!

Every time I conduct a
marriage here I witness an act of faith – great faith. Brides and
bridegrooms put themselves into each others hands, believing that their
partner will keep the promises they are making to love, honour and
cherish them. Sometimes that faith is justified, sometimes, sadly, it
isn’t, but it is certainly there on that day, otherwise few would be
daft enough to embark on the enterprise of married life.

That
act of faith is often followed by another, perhaps even greater one.
Bearing and nurturing children is one of the greatest acts of faith we
can take. Bringing up a family demands huge amounts of effort on the
part of parents. We feed our children and clothe them. We send them to
school. We watch anxiously as they negotiate the challenges of growing
up. But we’ve no way of knowing for sure how they will turn out,
whether our investment will help them become happy, caring fulfilled
individuals. Their lives are ultimately in their own hands.

Life
demands of us a constant stream of acts of faith – faith in the future,
faith in others, faith in ourselves too. We don’t know what will happen
- there’s nothing certain, as they say, except death and taxes – but
the things we believe aren’t just wishful thinking, empty dreams.
Deciding to believe something almost always leads to action of some
sort. We believe in our children, so we give them our support. We
believe that we’ll be paid, so we turn up for work. Our beliefs
determine what we do. They shape our life. Our faith isn’t always
rewarded in the way we hope, of course, but unless we are prepared to
take a risk the future we hope for will have no chance of becoming
reality. Today’s Bible readings remind us of that.

The first two
readings we heard both spoke of the faith of Abraham and Sarah, an
elderly childless couple who came to believe that God had promised them
not only a child, but a whole raft of descendents – more than the stars
in the sky and the grains of sand on the beach – and a land for them
all to live in. They believed this promise. They believed it so much
that they were prepared to leave everything they had, travelling across
the desert for years to put themselves in the right place for this to
work out. The writer to the Hebrews put it memorably – they “saw and
greeted” the promise of God to them. I like that image of “greeting the
promise” – going out to meet it, putting yourself where it is, acting
in ways that will bring it about rather than simply sitting and waiting
for it to happen by magic.

Jesus put it another way. We make
purses for ourselves, he said. We invest time, energy, money in the
things that matter to us. We may find we have invested wisely, or we
may not, but by putting aside those resources we will go some way to
bringing about what we hope for.

Belief and action go
together, say our readings. How we act reveals what we believe. What we
believe shapes how we act. If you really think the burglar is coming,
you guard the house, says Jesus - something close to home here in St
Peter and St Paul at the moment! We certainly believe in our burglars
and are doing everything we can to thwart them!

This link
between belief and action is obvious in our everyday lives, but in a
minute we shall be standing and reciting together a whole string of
other things we claim to believe as we join together in the words of
the Creed. We believe in God, the Creator of all things visible and
invisible, we shall say, and in Jesus the Son of God, in the Holy
Spirit, in the church, in the life everlasting and the forgiveness of
sins. Every week we say these things, but how do they translate into
reality? What difference do they make to us? Where is the link here
between belief and action?

The trouble with the Creeds is that
it is far too easy to see them just as a checklist of Christian
orthodoxy, rather academic theological statements to which we
feel we
should agree if we want to call ourselves Christians, but having
nothing to do with real life. Virgin Birth? Resurrection? – what’s
difference to they make? But the Creed isn’t meant to be an exercise in
mental gymnastics, testing our ability to believe six impossible things
before breakfast. Just like all those other things we believe, these
fundamentals of Christian faith are meant to lead to action. Saying the
Creed is supposed to be a way of “greeting the promises”, of shaping
our own Christian lives and the life of the church so that we are ready
to work alongside God in bringing the future he wants into being. It
can’t do that, of course, if we regard it as just an abstract set of
formulae, something for us simply to rattle off, leaving the business
of interpreting it to the professionals. If it is really going to make
a difference we need to understand it creatively, intelligently and for
ourselves, discovering what it might mean here and now for us.

If
we take the Creed seriously– not as a dead list, but as a living
framework for action – it can be astonishingly powerful in its impact.
Have a look at it in your service book. We start by talking about God
as Creator, for example. If we really believe that – however we
understand it – it will have huge implications for the way we treat
God’s world – as a precious gift, not as our own possession which we
can exploit as we want. If Jesus really is God among us, that has
huge
implications for the way we treat humanity. God is one of us, we are
saying. Being human, in all its messiness and vulnerability was good
enough for him. Yet often we resent human weakness and limitation. We
look anywhere but here, where we are, for the presence of God. We think
faith is about other-worldly mystical things. We think it should enable
us to rise above the frustrations of life rather than finding God
within them.

If we believe in the Holy Spirit, that means faith
is living and dynamic, not a museum piece, not something we can control
and regulate. Believing in the church should make a difference too. It
is catholic, we say in the Creed, which means universal. So it’s not
just in our corner of the world, not just made up of those who worship
and think as we do. It is apostolic – a word that literally means “sent
out” like the first followers of Jesus – the apostles - were. We are
still sent out with the good news we received from others, put into our
hands to shape and transmit for our generation. Believing in a
catholic, apostolic church doesn’t mean that we are all the same or
that the church never changes, but it does mean recognising our
connections to each other, across the world and across time, valuing
and learning from each other’s successes and mistakes.

Believing
in forgiveness, life everlasting, God’s ability to re-create and heal
his world – clearly these, if we take them seriously, affect the way we
live now, filling us with hope for ourselves and for others, preventing
us from giving up on people or writing them off.

Belief and
action go together. What we do – how we treat ourselves, each other and
our world – reveals what really matters to us, what kind of purses we
have made for ourselves, what kind of future we are aiming for. Today’s
readings are a challenge to us to look at the purses we are making, to
look at the kind of future we are investing in, and to ask ourselves
whether the things we say with our lips – those ancient statements that
we shall stand and say together in a moment - really make any
difference to our lives, because if they don’t then we might as well
remain silent.
Amen.

It’s good to be back with you tonight. Philip and I have been
away in Italy on holiday over the last couple of weeks. It was very hot
and dry - unlike England was, I understand! - but very interesting too.
It’s always fascinating to visit new places, to have a completely
different experience for a while – new food, new sights to see
– but I have to confess that there does come a point in any
holiday when I start to look forward to coming home – back to a
place where they know how to make a cup of tea and the street signs are
in a language I can understand.

Foreign travel is great, but, as the song says, there’s no place like
home.

That was what Jacob felt - Jacob the Patriarch, whose death we heard
about in our first reading. It was the end of a very long saga. He was
born in the land of Canaan, where his Grandfather Abraham had settled
many years before. As time had passed the family had thoroughly put
down their roots. Jacob had fathered 10 sons – the family were
part of the landscape of Canaan. But then disaster struck. Famine hit
Canaan. Like so many before and since the family had to seek food where
they could find it, and that meant Egypt. But in the process of
seeking refuge there Jacob made the wonderful discovery that one of his
sons, Joseph, whom he thought was long dead, had actually been taken
there and had risen to high office. So Jacob and his family
weren’t just anonymous refugees. They fell on their feet. Egypt
was kind to them. Despite this unexpected good fortune, though, for
Jacob, Egypt wasn’t home and could never be home. As his life
drew to a close he knew that this was not where he wanted his bones to
rest. “Take me home when I die” he said to his sons,
“and bury me there”. Eventually Joseph too would make the
same request. There’s no place like home.

It wasn’t simply nostalgia for the familiar hills and valleys
that prompted their longing for home, though. At this stage in the
development of Israel’s religious thought God was still seen as
very much a tribal god, one among many, who had his own spiritual
territory just as Jacob’s family had their physical territory.
Being buried back in Canaan meant resting in land that was under their
God’s control, rather than being entrusted to the foreign Gods of
the Egyptians. They might have fine temples and elaborate rituals, but
they weren’t the god to whom Jacob and Joseph felt they belonged,
the one who knew them, who had called them and cared for them.

It wasn’t until the time of Moses that it occurred to anyone that
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob might be universal, everywhere, not
limited to a set patch. When Moses heard a voice from a burning bush he
took a lot of convincing that this was really the God of his ancestors.
Moses and his people needed to learn this, though, because if God was
not the God of all places, how could he hear and see the misery of his
people in slavery in this foreign land? What power or authority would
he have to rescue them? They had to learn that they didn’t need
to go home to be with their God, as Jacob and Joseph thought –
they could be at home with him wherever they were, because he was at
home everywhere, even to the ends of the earth.

At first glance the second reading we heard today might seem to have no
connection with the first. St Paul writes about the strange phenomenon
of speaking in tongues. There are really two distinct phenomena which
are given this name in the New Testament. The first is what happened on
the Day of Pentecost. You’ll recall that the apostles, emboldened
by the Holy Spirit, rush out into the streets of Jerusalem and find
words spilling out of them that they don’t understand. The crowd,
however, made up of people from all nations, recognise the languages
they are speaking as their own. “Everyone heard God speaking in
their own language”, the Bible says.

That’s one kind of speaking in tongues, but Paul is talking about
something rather different. The “speaking in tongues” that
is happening in the Corinthian church’s worship is a sort of
ecstatic utterance, and it is still a regular feature of worship in
many Pentecostal or Charismatic churches. I used to worship in one in
my late teens, and a service without “speaking in tongues”
was rare. What normally happens is that people – sometimes en
masse – run out of words to praise God, so what takes over
is just sounds, words they don’t know the meaning of, sometimes
sung rather than spoken. It might sound rather alien to your own
experience of church (and I don’t think you’ll find much
space for it in the Book of Common Prayer!) but perhaps it helps to
think of it as something like the experience we have when we listen to
a wonderful piece of music, or look at a great work of art. They can
sometimes unlock things in us that are too deep for words, that cannot
be expressed any other way. We can’t explain it rationally, but
they take us beyond ourselves into a mystery greater than ourselves.
That’s exactly the same sort of thing that “speaking in
tongues” does for those in churches where it is commonplace. It
is a way into the mystery of God, a way to encounter that which is
beyond understanding.

Speaking in tongues is probably not going to be Seal church’s cup
of tea, but whatever your church background, acknowledging and
encountering mystery is an important part of worship, an important part
of faith.
We all need to look beyond the familiar, beyond the rational sometimes
because, in truth, our understanding is limited. If I can reduce God to
something I can understand, I can be sure that my vision of God is
false, or at least woefully incomplete. An early Christian theologian,
Evagrius of Pontus, said that “God cannot be grasped by the mind.
If he could be grasped, he would not be God.” Worship that
doesn’t leave some space for God to surprise us, where everything
is explained and contained, isn’t likely to move anyone forward
in their faith.

Speaking in tongues may not be part of our regular worship, but it was
and still is a perfectly valid way in which many people experience that
sense of the mystery of God. That is why St Paul doesn’t tell the
Corinthians to stop. What he does do, though, is to urge caution, and
that caution is just as important for those of us who are attracted to
the mystery of faith in other ways. There is always a danger that we
can be carried away by the alluring whiff of something exotic. It can
easily turn into mere escapism. If you speak in tongues, says Paul, no
one can understand you. You can’t even understand yourself. Your
heart might be lifted up, but your mind is left untouched. You might
get a glimpse of the distant horizons of the mysteries of God, a sense
of his hugeness, of the immensity of his power, but you can’t
really see him at work close up, in the mundane things of life, the
things that really make a difference to the way you live. The same can
be just as true if we are attracted to worship solely because the music
moves us, or the architecture, or the sound of the words, but we never
let the meaning of what we are hearing come home to us and change the
things we do in our everyday lives. Whether you speak in tongues or
not, Sunday worship can all too easily be an escape from reality,
rather than a place where we are equipped to deal with that reality
when Sunday is over.

So there is a balancing act in these two readings. Faith that is all
familiar – with which we feel completely at home - that depends
on God being where we expect him to be, as we expect him to be,
as he has always been, is faith that is too small. But faith that is
all mystery, faith that never comes home to us where we are, and never
touches the everyday and unspectacular is useless too.

These two readings tell us that we need both to have an awareness of
God “at home” with us, in the Monday mornings of our life,
embedded in the small things - a God who speaks to us in words we
understand. But we also need a God who can surprise us, a God who can
call us out into places that seem strange and foreign to us, to
adventures we haven’t considered.

There’s no place like home, says the old song, but where is home?
For God, home is everywhere. There is nowhere, no experience, nothing
that is outside his grasp. He calls us to a faith that knows that
wherever we are, however foreign and strange, however mundane and
familiar, he is there with us. You may be someone who likes to
stay at home, or someone with itchy feet and eyes on the distant
horizon. You may love the familiar, or crave the exotic and mysterious.
Both things are necessary and need to be held in balance. Ultimately we
will discover that if we are at home in God and God in us, all our
journeys are from him, in him and to him, and he who sends us out is
already present at our journey’s end.
Amen

He
has to be one of the most isolated figures in the Bible, this man in
the parable we’ve just heard. Think
about the story. If you had to dramatise it how many characters would
you need? Apart from God’s surprise appearance at the end, just
one. This is a play with a cast of one. There’s no one in this
rich man’s world except himself. Even when he talks, it is only
to himself, and what he says tells us all we need to know about the way
he sees the world. In five short verses, the words I and my occur no less than ten times –
and no one else is referred to at all. “What should I do,” he says to himself, “for I have no place to store my crops?” His crops – no one
else’s. “My grain, my
goods.” Do you suppose he grew them all by himself? I
rather doubt it. I am quite sure that there would have been servants,
slaves, and other family members involved. “I will pull down my
barns and build larger ones…” Single handed? I don’t
think so. But whatever labour force he has is completely invisible to
him. He is alone in his own world. He has taken the notion of private
property to its extreme. His whole life is private, kept to himself. He
even treats his soul as his own possession, his to command. “I
will say to my soul, “Soul,
you have ample goods…relax, eat, drink, be merry!” Of
course, his belief that he is the ruler of his own one-man empire is a
complete delusion, as he discovers when the true Lord of his soul, and
of everything else for that matter, calls it back to himself, and all
that he has heaped up is lost to him.

The
story Jesus tells is a chilling warning about the effects of greed, and
the dangers of accumulating possessions. The classic misers of
literature, Scrooge or Silas Marner, have their roots in this story.
They too are isolated, cut off by the possessions which have, in the
end, taken possession of them.

These
are extreme pictures, of course. But my guess is that most of us are
likely to feel at least a twinge of guilt as we listen to this parable.
We all have our hoards. They may be hoards of junk we can’t bring
ourselves to throw away or genuine treasures that we have collected -
valuable objects or money in the bank. We might try to convince
ourselves that they will come in useful one day, or that we are just
making prudent provision for the future, but I doubt whether any of us
could really claim that we only have what we need, and nothing over.

So
how much is too much? When does need end and greed begin? Where is the
first step on the slippery slope that leads to us turning into Scrooge,
Silas Marner, or this rich fool that Jesus talks about?

There
have been some Christians who would argue that only radical poverty
– owning nothing – can guard against the sin of greed.
“Sell all you have and give the money to the poor and come and
follow me,” said Jesus to one rich young man. People like St
Francis, hearing these words read took them literally. We were in his
birthplace of Assisi a couple of weeks ago and you could still see the
habit he wore during his ministry on display in the basilica there. It
is so ragged and patched that even the patches have patches. He was the
son of a wealthy cloth merchant. He could have had the finest clothes
in Europe to wear, but this was the life he chose instead.

Such
drastic down-sizing isn’t really an option for most of us. We
have families to provide for, other people who depend on us. Even for
the Franciscans poverty has been difficult to define. Can you own a
Bible, for example, and still call yourself poor? The early friars
begged for food, but is that really right – surely you are just
taking what others have produced, relying on the very economic
structures you have rejected?

Some
Christians, indeed, would argue that food, drink, the land and its
produce, physical delights of all sorts are part of God’s gift to
us. Self-denial throws God’s goodness back in his face,
they’d say.

So
it’s all a bit problematical. I suspect most of us muddle
through, buying what we fancy, and then feeling guilty afterwards,
salving our consciences by offloading the junk onto a charity shop
rather than just throwing it into the bin.

Where
does need end and greed begin? It’s not a simple matter. For
some, like Francis, two sets of clothes seems like one set too many.
Others have no trouble justifying having two homes. It all seems very
subjective, this matter of how many possessions we can heap up before
we are being greedy.

But
perhaps that is the problem. We think greed can be measured by the
number of possessions we have – the size of the hoard. But the
Bible, it seems to me, takes a different view, and this parable of
Jesus illustrates it. For Jesus the sin of greed isn’t to do with
possessions themselves – it is a sin that is rooted in
relationships gone awry.

The
Greek word translated as greed literally means “having
more” – having more than your share, having more than
others. It is not something that can be measured in absolute terms of
how much or how many. We commit the sin of greed when we forget
that if we have more someone else is almost certainly going to have to
make do with less. Sometimes we can see that happening – if we
take the biggest slice of cake there will be less for others. Often,
though, it will be hidden - the cut-price clothing made by underpaid
workers half a world away, the services provided by minimum-wage
workers who we scarcely notice. Greed begins when we forget our
connectedness to each other and our responsibility towards each other.
Above all it begins when we forget that all that comes into our hands
is ultimately a gift from God – our physical bodies, the
ecosystems we depend on – we did nothing to earn or deserve them.
There is nothing, not even life itself, which is truly ours – an
entitlement, ours to keep.

We
don’t make the sun shine, the rain fall. We can’t make the
seeds germinate or the crops grow. We can’t control where we are
born or to whom, whether in this prosperous corner of the world or in
Darfur or the slums of Bangladesh, and that, let’s face it has
far more to do with our chances of being wealthy than how hard we are
prepared to work for our living. Does a sweatshop worker in the Third
World work any less hard than an investment banker in the City of
London? Probably not, but they will reap much less for their labours.
That inequality has its roots in historic crimes – slavery,
unfair dealing, empires built by the use of force – as well as in
current economic systems. The dice are not fairly loaded. We profit
because others have lost. Greed is not simply a lust for more
which leaves us bloated as individuals, it is the fruit of
individualism itself, which puts us at the centre of our own world,
oblivious to the relationships in which we are meant to exist.

The
story Jesus tells is prompted by a question from the crowd about a
relationship, one which has gone badly wrong. “Tell my brother to
share the inheritance with me, teacher!” Two siblings have fallen
out, as people do, in the wake of a death. Their squabble might seem to
be about money, but actually, if their relationship had been right to
start with there would have been no problem. Families whose
relationships are right tend to regard money as fluid, flowing from
those who have to those who need it in mutual support. A world
whose relationships are right would make sure that wealth was fairly
shared too. But these two brothers – like our world - have lost
the love that should have bound them together, and that means that
their attitude to their shared possessions has gone awry too.

The
rich fool of Jesus’ parable fails to see the ways in which the
stuff of his life connects him to others – those who labour
alongside him, those who could benefit from sharing what he has. He
fails to see how his possessions connect him to God too, who gave him
the life he regards as his own, who made that abundant harvest possible
with his free gifts of sun and rain and fertile soil. He may have so
much stuff he doesn’t even know where to put it, but he is as
poor in love as it is possible to be, alone in the world, alone in
life and alone in death. This poverty of love not only hurts him but
others too, who ought to share in this abundant harvest. His
greed doesn’t consist in the absolute amount of stuff he has
– how many barns is he allowed before he has too many? –
but in his refusal to acknowledge the rich network of relationships
that has put him in this fortunate position. To do that would open his
hands and his heart and his life to others and to God.

Greed
is not, in the end, about how much you should own, but about the
absurdity of thinking that there is anything which we can really call
ours. Need becomes greed when we forget that whether we have a spare
shirt or a whole spare house, they are not ours to hang onto. The
world, and our life within it, is all a gift from God, put into our
hands for a time to be used for the sake of all his creation. Only when
we see these things as they are - transient blessings to be enjoyed and
passed along - will we discover the true treasure which is ours to
keep, the love which connects us to each other, and the love which
connects us to our generous God. Amen

I
went to my daughter’s graduation earlier this week. Of course the
most important moment for me was when she walked across the stage to
receive her hard-earned Philosophy degree, but an added bonus at this
particular ceremony was the special guest at the ceremony. As you may
know, it is the usual custom at university graduations to confer an
honorary degree on someone who has achieved notable success in some
field or other. They then give what is meant to be an encouraging
speech to the new graduates. It’s pot luck who you get; it might
be a distinguished academic or a sporting, artistic or media figure.
Sometimes they are good speakers; sometimes they aren’t. We were
lucky. The honorary degree was being awarded to Alexander McCall Smith.
He’s actually an eminent professor of medical law, but he is
better known to most as the author of the “No.1 Ladies’
Detective Agency” books, set in the cattle farming country of
Botswana, and featuring the “traditionally built” Mma
Ramotswe, who solves crimes with a mix of common sense and kindness.

Professor
McCall Smith congratulated everyone on their achievements, but, mindful
of the pressures to make a success of their lives that many of his
audience probably felt he also decided to pass on a bit of Mma
Ramotswe’s home-spun wisdom to them. “What use was
it,” she had said in one of his books “having all the money
in the world, if you could never just sit still and watch the
cattle?”

All
this may seem to have nothing whatever to do with today’s Gospel
reading. There is no sitting still there, no quiet cattle to watch,
just an injured man on a dangerous road, desperately in need of someone
to do something to help him. But the principle is, I think, the same.
To watch cattle you have to be present in the here and now, in this
moment, paying attention to them, seeing what is in front of your eyes.
If you can’t do that, how will you know their needs and their
habits; how will you know when one is missing or ill; how will you be
able to look after them properly?

Mma
Ramotswe was right. Too often our minds are on our own worries, our
agendas. Our attention is anywhere but on the here and now. We are
distracted. We don’t see what is in front of us – not in
any way that will be any use. It is the same in the parable Jesus
tells. The priest and the Levite hurry past this beaten-up man because
they have their eyes on the future. They are heading for Jerusalem, to
do their duties in the Temple. For them nothing - not even this life
and death situation– can be allowed to get in the way. Quite
apart from the fact that they will probably be late, they are also
likely to make themselves ritually unclean. Touching dead bodies would
mean an elaborate and time-consuming purification rite, and this man
looked more dead than alive to them.

They
have their eyes on the future, but the lawyer to whom Jesus tells this
story and probably most of the crowd who were with him have their eyes
on the past. For centuries Jews had hated Samaritans and vice versa. As
soon as Jesus mentioned the Samaritan that long history of bitterness
crowded out any other thoughts.

It
is only the Samaritan who really has his eyes on the present. He sees a
man who needs his help. He helps him. End of story. He doesn’t
ask his race or background. He doesn’t want to know what’s
happened. Whatever he was planning for that day he puts on hold.
Nothing he is doing is worth more than a man’s life, and that is
what it might cost if he leaves him by the roadside.

My
guess is that many of us tonight know perfectly well that there are
issues in our lives which are right there in front of us, crying out
for our unhurried, whole-hearted attention. But it’s not easy
just to take notice of them, letting the reality of our lives just be
what it is. We want to rush on with our own plans, and we resent
anything that doesn’t fit in with them. Or we find that past
hurts, or old prejudices stop us seeing things clearly. We are
restless, hoping that the things that call out to us for attention will
just shut up and go away.

I
hope Mma Ramotswe would approve of our “Breathing Space”
service. The whole point of the silences in this service are to give us
time to “watch the cattle” so to speak – not
necessarily trying to resolve weighty issues, or even consciously to
pray, but just to be aware, in the loving company of God and one
another of what it is that is calling out to us in the here and now,
where we are, tonight, for our attention. Because if we can’t see
what is in front of us, how can we ever hope to respond to it?

Amen

SERMON FOR STEWARDSHIP SUNDAY(for
other information given out at this special service, please
click here)

You may have noticed that some new leaflets appeared in
the church just before our flower festival –church trail
leaflets, which tell you a bit about the history and features of the
church (adults
and children's
leaflets - downloadable here).
I’ve been meaning to write them for ages, but that was
the spur that got me going. It was fascinating writing them. I’m
not too bothered on architectural detail – the height of the
tower and the precise kind of roof we’ve got – but what
does fascinate me are the clues we find around the church about the
people who have worshipped here, the people to whom this place has been
important. Most of you have been worshipping here much longer than me,
but perhaps, for the benefit of those who haven’t met these
characters I can introduce a few of them.

Our oldest named “inhabitant” so to speak, is
of course, Sir William De Bryene – you can see his brass up by
the altar. The Latin inscription around him tells us Here lies the Lord
William de Bryene, knight, formerly Lord of Kemsing and of Seal who
died on the 23rd day of the month of September in the year of our Lord
1395, to whose soul may God be propitious. Amen. He’s the local
bigwig, buried in the position of greatest honour in the church
according to the beliefs of medieval Christians. This place mattered to
him. He wanted to be remembered here, in the church he worshipped in,
and, no doubt supported financially. I expect the church looked very
different in his day, but some things would have been the same. Those
of you sitting on the south side of the church may be able to reach out
and touch the pillars there. They are medieval. Sir William De Bryene
might once have touched that very same stone…

If we move on a few centuries we might miss someone who I think was the
ultimate matriarch. Above the door to the vestry you can see a memorial
to Clemence Theobold. This good lady, who died in 1605 had seven sons
and nine daughters – they didn’t all survive infancy but
many of them did. And they must also have been inclined towards having
large families, because when Clemence died, the memorial tells us, she
was mother, grandmother or great-grandmother to 115 offspring. Imagine
the Christmas present list…!
I often look at that stone and wonder if she sat here in church
sometimes for a bit of peace and quiet as I know many of you do.

Then there is Maximillian Buck. I have a great fondness for him. He was
vicar here in the aftermath of the Civil War. I expect they needed a
bit of stability after all the turmoil of that, and they got it in
Maximillian – he was vicar from 1674 to 1720 – 46 years.
There are lots of marks of his influence here, and signs that he loved
this place. His memorial is at the back near the font. But this fine
chandelier was given in his memory too. And every week we use an
engraved chalice and paten that he gave. I love the chalice, partly
because the engraver made a mistake in the wording. He left out the
first “h” in church and had to alter it to squeeze it in. I
wonder how he would have felt if he had known that 350 years later
people were still noticing his mistake?

There are many more stories to tell here, of course, but there are just
as many stories we don’t know. We’ve still got some old
wedding registers here from the early 1800’s – and what I
notice looking at them is the large number of people at the beginning
who sign their name with crosses. They couldn’t write even their
own names. But this place was here for them at the crucial moments in
their lives.

This church is certainly 800 years old, and it is quite likely that
Christians had been worshipping here in older buildings for long before
that too. There is an enormously long history, a huge legacy. Each of
those who came here did so because it mattered – not just the
building, but the spiritual support (and often very practical support
too) that the church gave them. Faith was important, the church was
important, ministry mattered. It made a difference to their lives.

My experience here in this community is that faith is still important,
the church is still important, ministry still matters. Seal is not a
sleepy hollow. The picture you often get from the media is of the
Church declining not only in numbers but also in its relevance to
people, but that isn’t how it seems to me at all. I have found
that there are far more requests from people to get involved in what is
going on locally, far more opportunities, than I can ever hope to meet,
even on a full time basis. The schools, the local organisations,
individuals marking the big moments in their lives – baptisms,
marriages, deaths – still want this church to be there for them,
as well as those in the regular congregation who want to worship, to
learn, to reflect and grow, or who need support at moments of crisis.
They want not only the old building and the churchyard, though that is
important, but the living support and witness of those who are part of
this church. On a regular basis the government (and the opposition)
call on the voluntary sector – and that includes faith groups
– to be involved in everything from schools to care for the
elderly and disabled, to community projects to rehabilitating offenders
to environmental action. We’re here, on the ground, a group made
up of people who are living on the spot, caring already for one another
and for other local people. It can feel quite exhausting, but it is
exciting too, and a great privilege.

The harvest is plentiful, says Christ to his followers in today’s
Gospel reading, but the labourers are few (Luke 10.2) That can sound a
bit aggressive, as if we are going out with scythes to cut people down
like wheat and bundle them in whether they like it or not. But I
don’t think Jesus means it like that. What I think he is pointing
us to is the fact that there is work to be done, people who need what
we have, people too who have what we need, people we can learn from,
and people who can learn from us. There are blessings to be shared.
Don’t believe those stories of decline or of the irrelevance of
the church – if it were so I would have a much easier job –
I really would be able to do this job part-time! I suspect that
sometimes we are unnecessarily apologetic about the church. There is
certainly a lot that we can apologise for – nationally,
internationally and locally – and times when we want to say of
the church “not in my name!”, but that doesn’t
mean that what we do here – all of us together –
doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal, just as it did to Sir
William de Bryene, Clemence Theobold, Maximillian Buck and all those
nameless ordinary people who have found peace, hope and joy here, and
to the people of the present and the future who also need this place,
its ministry and its message.

It takes time, talents and effort to respond to those opportunities,
but it also takes money. Mike’s given you the facts and figures
– I hope you’ll go away and ponder them and respond as you
are able, so that we can continue to try to do what God has called us
to here.

TALK BY MIKE HARVEYTreasurer of St Peter And St PaulIntroductory comments:Today’s focus on stewardship
is not just about asking for more money, because some may have to
review their giving downwards, but rather an opportunity to look at
what and how we give something back to the Church here at Seal.
However, we are at a bit of a financial crossroads and we felt it was
appropriate to look at the money situation and to give people the
chance to reflect on this and their personal giving in a more formal
way. Some background information on our finances is shown on various
boards around the Church, (and in the leaflet, “Stewardship at St
Peter and St Paul)2. Précis
of expenditure:It costs about £70,000 a
year to run Seal Church on a full time basis, by which I mean assuming
that we pay a full stipend to the Vicar as we did for Keith and his
predecessors. In reality, Anne is currently paid at two-thirds
but is giving us a full time commitment, something the PCC is very keen
to redress if possible.90% of our total annual costs are
effectively unavoidable unless we start cutting the number or quality
of the services or shut the Church Hall.In 2007, even without adjusting
the stipend, we are budgeting for a loss of around £1,500 and
this will increase steadily over the coming years if we do nothing
about it to around £7,000 per annum by 2010. This also
assumes that our income remains constant.3. Précis of income:Our budgeted income for 2007 is
between £55,000 and £60,000. However, we already know
that some of this is ‘at risk’ with people having moved
away or died.Nearly half of this income comes
from planned giving and a further 9% from cash collections each
Sunday. The remainder comes from Fees (weddings and funerals),
fund raising, income from investments, church hall lettings, the
occasional legacy, miscellaneous donations and so forth.So you can see how very important
the planned giving element is to us as, with the tax rebate (from Gift
Aided giving), this accounts for over 60% of our total income.
Including cash collections this goes up to just over 70%. We also
have a greater degree of control over these elements.4. Value of
planned giving:The pattern of planned giving at
Seal is also shown on one of the boards (and in the leaflet) –
with some comparative living costs ranging from the basic to the luxury
end of the market. For those who are on the planned giving scheme
the weekly average is just over £8.50 – more or less the
cost of a book or a CD (or a bottle of spirits), whichever you can best
relate to. This equates to £37.00 per month.Clearly, some of us can afford
more and some of us cannot – the important thing, to my mind, is
the principle of the commitment itself.Planned giving means just that, a
commitment to pay a certain amount per week or month (some are
quarterly or annual) which enables us to rely on a bedrock of income which the Church will receive whether
or not people attend services and put money in the plate each Sunday.This then allows us to predict
with confidence what money is coming in each month and to budget our
expenditure accordingly.5. Value
of Gift Aid:It also gives us the opportunity
to use Gift Aid, which can currently raise another 28% on top by way of
a rebate from the Government. However this will drop to 25% from
April 2008 which means that our income from this one element will
reduce by over 11% (about £900 a year).In order just to recoup that loss,
everyone would need to increase their giving by around 2¼%.Of course, none of us really know
yet how we will be affected personally by this new, lower basic rate of
tax, but I guess that most of us will be a bit better off.Higher rate taxpayers can also
reclaim the tax paid between the basic and higher rate bands through
their annual tax returns.6. Closing
comments:Please, therefore, give some
thought to these issues:• If
you give via the collection plate, would you be prepared to switch to
the planned giving scheme – if you feel uncomfortable letting the
plate go by without putting something in then this can be done by way
of the envelope scheme;• How much do
you think you should be giving each week or month and how much can you
afford?• If you
(or your spouse/partner) are a UK tax payer, then please give serious
thought to gift aiding your regular contribution (and, indeed, any
one-off donations) as the opportunity to reclaim a large percentage
from the Government is really too good to miss.Having to prepare this short talk
has given me the chance to reflect on what the Church here at Seal
means to me personally – the building, the people, the music
– is it worth supporting financially and, if so, how much should
I give?Our target is to increase overall
income by around £15,000 in a full year, which will enable us to
reward Anne properly and to have a little room for manoeuvre going
forward. This represents more than a third again based on our
current giving, which is demanding.The Diocese calls stewardship
‘TRIO’ (the responsibility is ours) and I agree that each
and every one of us is responsible for Seal Church and its finances,
but I would particularly appeal to any who are not currently on the
planned giving scheme to respond.1st July 07 - Patronal
FestivalMy
guess is that there is one thing that just about every adult in the
congregation today has brought with them to church. These –
keys… You might just have one or two. You might have a vast
bunch, but most of us don’t leave the house without them (or if
we do, we soon wish we hadn’t!)
These are my church keys – handed to me when I took over here.
There are tiny keys for cabinets and cupboards, and huge ancient keys
as well. This is the tower key – I don’t usually carry it
around! Of course I have other keys too – house keys for various
doors and windows, bike keys, garage keys, spare keys. And then there
is this bag of keys here. These are all those mystery keys – you
know, the ones you find at the back of drawers, or in the pockets of an
old coat, and you think “what on earth does that
unlock?” They might be keys to houses I moved out of long
ago that I forgot to return, or keys to padlocks that are lost and gone
forever, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to throw them away
because as soon as I did, you can bet that padlock would turn up or I
would remember the door they opened, and then I would be really stuck.
If you looked up at the flag flying over the church today you’d
have seen another set of keys there. The keys of St Peter, along with
the sword of St Paul. These are the keys that Jesus spoke of in the
Gospel reading. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, says
Jesus to Peter. If ever there was an important set of keys, surely this
is them. That’s why Peter has such a prominent place in the
Christian church. He is given the keys that open heaven’s doors,
says Jesus, the power that binds and looses. Church leaders ever since
have been very keen to trace their spiritual ancestry back to Peter for
that reason – apostolic succession, it is called – the
direct line back to this first apostle. The coat of arms of the Vatican
consists of the keys of St Peter but entwined in the traditional triple
crown of the pope – a pretty clear message! This is the
Gospel that is read when new priests are ordained as well. The
implication is that we have the power too to open or lock spiritual
doors for people.
But personally, I think this can be a dangerous way of reading this
story. Clergy can end up thinking they have far more power than they
really do, far more power than is really good for them, and those who
aren’t ordained can feel they have no power at all. Those who
have the keys can control who comes in and out, and when and how. Those
without the keys may never feel more than visitors, guests, even if
welcome one. They may never feel at home, able to make the place their
own.
This story is so often read as if it is just about St Peter and those
who claim succession from him, about authority in the church, about who
gets to make the decisions that matter, but I think that’s not a
very helpful interpretation, and I doubt if it is a fair reflection of
its original meaning.
Peter has just made a startling declaration – “You are the
Messiah, the son of the living God”, he has said to Christ. As
usual Peter comes out with something that maybe the others are just
thinking. He has courage. He has conviction. He has that natural
quality of leadership. It is clear he is going to have influence over
others, a rock upon which they will lean. But what will that influence
be?
When Jesus speaks to him about keys and kingdoms he’s reminding
him of the power he will wield because people will look to him. Power
to bind and loose. Power to help people come close to God or power to
keep them away. Peter will know himself what it feels like to be on the
wrong end of the power that keys give one day too. When he finds
himself in prison in that jail in Jerusalem, in chains with four squads
of soldiers guarding him, it won’t be the keys of the kingdom he
wants, but the keys that hang from the jailer’s waist. Although
on this occasion he is miraculously rescued, one day it won’t be
so. According to tradition he doesn’t die as a powerful leader,
wielding authority, but as a prisoner of the Romans, nailed to a cross
like his master.
Jesus’ words are a promise of authority, but they are also a
warning to him – a reminder of the damage you can do with keys,
and the responsibility that goes with being a key holder. Keys
don’t just weigh down your pocket or your handbag, they can weigh
down your heart too. When you got your first key you probably felt
special, independent, grown up. But it isn’t long before we
realise that having the keys means remembering where you put them,
being responsible for locking and unlocking. I know if I hear the
church alarm go off that I really have to respond – I’m a
key holder. I know if something is stolen that I am bound to think,
“did I remember to lock up properly?” I know that I will
have to make a decision about whether to let people in, or keep them
out. I’ve got the keys, and that is what goes with being a key
holder.
Jesus draws Peter’s attention to the keys he holds in his hands,
the responsibility he will have to set the direction for Jesus’
other followers, to shape the way this new movement will grow and
develop.
And although we might have thought that this really only applies to
Peter, or perhaps to those who follow him into positions of authority
in the church, actually it applies to all of us. We all carry keys that
can lock and unlock doors for others, that can make their lives
heavenly or hellish. We can welcome them and help them grow, or we can
slam the door of new possibilities in their face. We can imprison
people by stereotyping them. We can lock them out of participating in
their communities by the economic or political power we wield. Simple
things like thinking about disabled access, or not stigmatising
particular groups – assuming that all young people are up to no
good, for example – can make all the difference.
On an individual level we hold keys that open the doors for people in
our families, in our workplaces and in our churches. A friendly
welcome. A decision to forgive old hurts and let bygones be bygones.
Willingness to give up control of our little empires, letting others
have their say and make their mark. All these things proclaim that the
doors are open, that people can come in and make themselves at home.
This weekend has been great, despite the rain and the road closures.
I’ve been really delighted with the number of people from our
local community who have done flower arrangements for our flower
festival, and don’t they look marvellous in all their variety!
Many of these people aren’t regular churchgoers, and certainly
not regular flower arrangers, but they felt able to have a go, and I
hope the message got across that this is a church for the whole
community, their church, not the exclusive property of those who
worship here regularly – and certainly not the property of the
parish priest. I and a few others may hold the keys, but during the day
at least we don’t lock the doors . That sometimes surprises
people, and of course it is a risk, but it is a powerful way of saying,
whoever you are, you have a right to be here, this is your home too.
People appreciate that, and they say so. I’d like to see that
sense of shared ownership grow even stronger – it seems to me it
is what Jesus’ words to Peter are really getting at.
So, yes, I have the keys to the church, but so do you, so do we all. I
have the keys to the kingdom of heaven, but so do you, so do we all. I
can bind and loose people, shutting them in, locking them out, or
setting them free to be themselves, but so do you, and so do we all.
Next time you get out your keys, think to yourself, what are the other
keys I hold, the other doors I can lock or unlock, the people who I
have power to bind and loose. May we use our keys in the service of
Christ and of his kingdom.
Amen24th
June 07 - Trinity 3 Sermon by Kevin Bright What
is in a name?According
the Office for National Statistics the most popular names for baby boys
and girls in 2006 were:-JACK
OLIVIATHOMAS
GRACE JOSHUA
JESSICA OLIVER
RUBY HARRY
EMILY JAMES
SOPHIE WILLIAM
CHLOE SAMUEL
LUCY DANIEL
LILY CHARLIE
ELLIEThe
influence of celebrity is apparent with 38 babies called Cruz (after
David Beckham's third child) and 14 Peaches (after the daughter of Bob
Geldof).What
is in a name? It may be that a better question is, “is a name really
all that important”?Well
I think it is important to us and most parents choose their
children’s names with great care. Babies grow into these names
and we can come to associate them with their character. It is often the
case that perfectly good names are not considered for babies because of
our negative experiences of someone with that name. I don’t
expect any of us have any friends called Saddam or Adolph. The opposite
is also true of figures from history, possibly biblical figures and
also loved family members whose memories we want to live on in our
children.Anyone
who has attended a confirmation service conducted by Bishop Michael
will know that he seems to have a remarkable ability to recall the
meaning of every name, reciting the meaning of every persons name as he
confirms them. Names and their meaning clearly seem significant to him.
It seems that he is encouraging the person confirmed to fulfill the
positive associations with their name in their Christian life.In
Luke’s gospel we heard how God not only removed the stigma of
barrenness (prevailing at that time) from Elizabeth but also gave her a
son, an event which brought much rejoicing in the community.The
name John has the meaning ‘the grace or mercy of the Lord’
and that gave a broad hint as to the future which John would be
preparing for. But
the most important event we heard of seems to be the act of breaking
with tradition. When Elizabeth’s friends and neighbours came on
the eighth day to circumcise the child they were going to name him
Zechariah (after his father).But
Elizabeth shocked her friends and neighbours when she proclaimed
‘No he is to be called John’. So much so that they turned
to Zechariah thinking he may overrule her.“His
name is John.” Zechariah wrote this sentence and immediately was
able to speak again. Some months before, he had been struck dumb when
he doubted the angel Gabriel’s message that his aging wife,
Elizabeth, would bear him a son.In
a time when to be childless meant being mocked and was considered by
some as punishment by God, Zechariah had been shocked that his prayers
were answered. We are forced to think whether we really expect some of
our often repeated long standing prayers to be answered ‘please
God bring peace and justice on earth’. I feel certain that we
would all be in for an uncomfortable shock if the earth’s
resources were shared equally tomorrow.The
point is that the conception and birth of John ran contrary to human
expectations and traditions and so did his naming, signifying changing
times ahead for the people.What,
then, will this child become asked the people sensing something special
and different about this baby? One who goes before the Lord to prepare
his ways prophesied his father.What
then for each of us as children of God, regardless of age. Do we have a
role to play in the world for God whatever we have been named? I think
that we all recognise that we can also be important in preparing the
way for Christ.Fortunately
for us it’s unlikely to involve living in the wilderness (not the
exclusive housing estate), and eating locusts.I
was reminded this week that we need to look out for our opportunities
to prepare the way for Christ. I
was stuck in a car with someone for a few hours and after discussing
many diverse topics the person said to me that she was reading a book
called life’s big questions. To cut a long story short a
discussion on ethics progressed to my passenger saying that she felt
Christianity was just a convenient prop for people too weak to face the
limits of their own lives and that it was ridiculous having all these
rules that had to be kept to have a chance of getting to a place that
doesn’t exist.I
explained that an arrangement like that would be pretty unattractive to
me as well, also that there would be little point in me pursuing a
faith that didn’t offer hope and forgiveness (the grace of the
Lord, the meaning of john’s name in other words). Most
importantly I suggested that Christianity is mostly about living day to
day in a relationship where you know you are loved and to try and
respond to this.Her
response surprised me when she stated’ that she had never heard
Christianity described in this way’, the association of the word
love was far removed from anything she heard about Church and religion.
I have some sympathy with her, I switched on radio 4’s Sunday
programme for a few minutes while I was in the bathroom this morning
and turned it off in despair after hearing nothing but raised voices,
bitterness and arguing about Islam and the freedom to move from one
religion to another. I suppose it’s mostly scandal, division and
failure in the church, and religion generally which makes the
headlines. After all they are not going to sell many newspapers with
headlines such as ‘Priest serves community through thick and
thin’ or Christians collect money to help others’ are
they! Anyway an awkward silence followed before we arrived at our
meeting and moved on to other matters.All
this bitterness and negative publicity doesn’t make our attempts
to be a forerunner for the ways of Christ any easier, but then it
wasn’t easy for John or many other biblical figures either, so
it’s not a reason to stop trying.Was
my conversation in the car an opportunity to prepare the way for
Christ? Quite possibly, the reality is that we can only try to be
ourselves; I don’t think God expects anything more. We need to
follow John in a literal sense, telling people they are a brood of
vipers is unlikely to lead to a positive conversation. Despite
the magnitude of John’s birth and the fact that he was preparing
the way for Christ Luke’s story remains real for the individual
and personal hopes of ordinary people. Zechariah and Elizabeth stand
out as real people with disappointments in their life, yet people who
struggle on hesitating between faith and doubt.Isaiah
speaks of the fragility of mankind when he describes people like grass
which withers when the breath of the Lord blows upon it. He describes
Palestinian springtime when the green grass is scorched by the sun and
hot air turning brown for summer. This is the fragility which God chose
to adopt through Christ. A human being baptised in the Jordan,
ridiculed, let down by those who followed him and forced to ask
‘My God My God why hast thou forsaken me?’Now
as then both the big picture and the smaller individual human stories
continue to matter to God and I think this is something many people can
relate to.Our
continuation of John’s work will be found in pointing people
towards Christ in whatever way we can. It’s most likely these
will be in personal natural relationships and conversations than
through announcements to large crowds of people. It’s not about
attracting attention to ourselves but about being honest enough about
our relationship with God, together with all its failures and
successes, bewilderment and insights, that others can see it could be
real for them too. Then it will not be us that they focus on but him
whose sandals we are not worthy to untie, Jesus Christ.Amen

17th June 07
Breathing Space Communion

Over the past half-century talking about sin and repentance has gone
out of fashion. All that gloom and doom, making people feel bad about
themselves – surely it can’t do us any good? We downplay
confession, not wanting to focus too much on the negative. It is good
that we are careful to try not to make people feel unnecessary guilt
– the threat of hell was so often no more than a way of
exercising social control.

But there is a downside to our modern aversion to all things
penitential. We may have learned to resist guilt that isn’t ours,
but often we seem also, it seems to me, to have lost the ability to
deal with the guilt that is ours. We do have responsibility for the
mess of the world, the mess of our lives. There’s nothing wrong
with feeling guilt for things we should feel guilty for; things that
are our fault.

Why are we so inclined to say “it’s not my fault, nothing
to do with me”? It’s partly the result of living in a
compensation culture. If we admit responsibility someone might sue us.
But it’s also a result of having forgotten that along with
penitence and repentance came absolution – God’s
forgiveness. Admitting we have done wrong is the first step towards
being put right. If we can’t admit our failings, there is no way
we can be forgiven and know the joy of a new start.

That, I suspect, is the problem with Simon the Pharisee and the circle
he moves in, who gather to hear this strange and controversial teacher,
Jesus of Nazareth. They aren’t perfect. Of course they
aren’t. No one is. But try getting them to admit to it. They have
all played very cool towards Jesus. Simon hasn’t even given him
the basic courtesies which any Middle Eastern host should have done.
They don’t need him, or anything he has to offer –
they’re all right, or at least they are making a bold stab at
appearing to be. I suspect they are relieved when a notorious local
woman shows up. Whatever they have done, whatever guilt they are
concealing in themselves, hers is surely worse. Jesus will be diverted
into condemning her – surely he won’t spot that there is
anything wrong with him.

But Jesus points out to them that they have it all upside down. This
woman’s extravagant gestures of love show that she knows how much
she has been forgiven for, and that she is delighted at the chance to
make a new start. She knows she has been given a precious second
chance, and she is determined not to waste it. But they, hiding behind
their façade of respectability, are going nowhere. Whatever sins
they carry are still weighing them down, and will always do so, because
they can’t even admit their existence.

Repentance isn’t a dead-end state of hair-shirt wearing misery.
It is the gateway into new life, something which this woman receives
with such joy that she can’t contain it. Yes, she was guilty
– we don’t know what of – but now she is forgiven,
and has a whole new life ahead of her. No wonder she is happy. They say
the best revenge is living well, but I think the best repentance is
living well too, “using aright the time that is left to us here
on earth” as a prayer in the funeral service puts it.

So tonight, if you are aware of something in your life that isn’t
as it should be, rejoice. That awareness can be the beginning of
something wonderful – the discovery that no sin is greater than
God’s power to forgive it, no sin greater than his love for us.
Amen.

10th June 07 -
Trinity 1

There
were two extraordinary stories in today’s readings. Two stories
of the miraculous raising of the dead. Two dead sons given back to
their widowed mothers. Elijah revives the son of the widow of
Zarephath and Jesus raises the son of the widow of Nain, even as
he is being taken away for burial. Amazing, powerful miracles.
But I wonder how we feel about them?

We might have intellectual doubts and questions. Could these miracles
really have happened? For us the line between life and death is clear
and firm. With our 21st century scientific and medical minds we know
that you are either alive or dead, and once you are dead, there’s
no coming back. If your heart has stopped, you aren’t
breathing and there is no brain activity then there is no life. We have
learned to look at the body as an isolated thing, a machine. When it
stops working, that’s it.

For the people of the ancient world, though, life and death
weren’t as clearly divided. They weren’t sure when life
started – most thought it was at quickening, when the mother felt
the baby inside her move. They believed that was when God put the soul
in the body. And they thought that the soul hung around for a few
days after the body died too. That’s why it mattered that Jesus
was three days in the tomb, so that no one could say that he
wasn’t properly dead. The boundary between life and death was
much more blurred than it is for us, and for that reason, they
wouldn’t have had the same problems we do with these stories. To
them, God gave life and God took life away, so it wasn’t much of
a stretch to think he could give life back again – it was a
matter of his will, not of scientific possibilities. They are amazed
when these dead sons rise, but not because they thought it was
impossible in any scientific sense. Their amazement had other roots,
which I’ll talk about more later.

So our modern ideas of life and death can easily side-track us, then.
Could these miracles really have happened? We don’t know, and
can’t know, but that, for the Bible writers isn’t the
point. It’s not what they want us to focus on at all.

The second concern we might have with these stories is an emotional
one. I belong to a preaching discussion list on the internet, a virtual
gathering of preachers from all over the world who talk about the
readings set for the week. This week an American preacher wrote in. She
had a dilemma. There had been a tragedy in her community. A 16 year old
boy had been killed in a road accident. Could she really preach on
these two stories about dead sons restored to their mothers, when this
community mourned a dead son of its own? She didn’t think the
family would be in her church, but others who were close to them might
be. I didn’t envy her the struggle she was having. Preaching on
miracles is always difficult. If you’re bereaved, ill, depressed,
hearing of the miraculous cure of others can seem like a slap in the
face. If God can heal people – even raise them from death –
why doesn’t he do it for everybody?

But this can be a red-herring too, because the Bible writers
weren’t trying to explain the whys and wherefores of human
suffering when they wrote down these stories. They weren’t trying
to explain why some individuals are healed and some not. The message
they intended to convey was a very different one.

So, if we put aside those intellectual questions and emotional
reactions that these stories can raise in us, what are we left with?
What were the writers trying to tell us?

The clue is in the reactions of the onlookers. They don’t say
– “wow – raising the dead – that’s
impossible, how did you do that?” They don’t call for a
public enquiry or a scientific investigation, in the hopes that these
cures can be repeated for everyone. For them, what these miracles show
is that God is at work, God is here, God has shown up in their midst.
“Now I know that you are a man of God,” says the widow at
Zarephath to Elijah, and the crowd at Nain cry out that “God has
looked favourably on his people!”. The Greek word they use is
linked to their word for an overseer, a supervisor, a boss–
it’s episcope in Greek.

“The boss has shown up!” shouts the crowd – God is
here among us. This miracle proves it beyond a doubt because who else
but God can give life? It’s what he does. He did it at the
beginning, breathing the breath of life into Adam and Eve. He is the
source of life, the sustainer of life. If the dead are rising, it must
be God.

“The boss has shown up!”, they cry, but as with the arrival
of any boss, there are mixed reactions to this. How you feel about the
boss’s presence depends on what you are up to when he arrives.
Some are frightened. They know that God will bring change, upsetting
their apple carts. But for others this is wonderful news.

It is wonderful news first and foremost, of course, for the two mothers
and sons in this story, not just because of the personal grief involved
in any bereavement, but also because to be a widow in ancient times was
a precarious business, and to be a childless widow was even worse. It
was very hard for women to have an existence independent of men. They
were always their husband’s wife, their father’s daughter,
their son’s mother. But these women have been left without the
protection of a man when their sons die, with no one who will be able
to support them in the future. They are at the bottom of the heap
– always the place where, in the Bible, God seems to show up
first. In fact for the widow of Zarephath there is another twist to
this. Zarephath isn’t in Israel – it is to the north in
Phoenicia, in a land which was often at war with Israel. So God has
shown up and is at work – shockingly – in a household where
perhaps foreign gods are worshipped, and certainly where the laws of
Moses were not kept. This widow is not even among the deserving poor
– why on earth would God be bothered with her.

But God is bothered, and he shows it as he gives Elijah the power to
raise him from death.

God – the boss – shows up for these two grieving, powerless
women, and he does what only he can do, what is most basically in his
nature – he gives life. That’s how the onlookers know it is
his work – because life comes from God. It is his gift alone.

The life that is given in these miracles is literal, physical life, but
there is a sense in which all the work of God – in the miracles
and ministry of the prophets and of Jesus is life-giving. Healing
miracles give back to the sick the chance to play a full part, to live
a full life in their society. Feeding the five thousand provides the
stuff of life to a hungry crowd. Calming a storm brings an end to the
chaos that threatens life. Jesus’ call to fishermen, tax
collectors, and prostitutes to follow him, gives them a dignity and
purpose that makes life worth living. Even those who oppose him are
challenged to live, rather than die. St Paul talks in the second
reading of the destructiveness of his former life before he followed
Christ.

There are many kinds of life and death – physical, emotional,
spiritual, social. There are plenty of people who are perfectly
healthy, but feel dead inside. Life without hope, love, connection to
others can feel as if it isn’t worth living, as if you might as
well be dead. When we look at these miracles only as baffling stories
about the re-animation of corpses they can seem a million miles from
our experience, but they aren’t meant to be. They aren’t
just about the weird things Elijah or Jesus might or might not have
done thousands of years ago. They are about what God is doing now, and
what God is calling us to do now as well.

I doubt whether any of us will see a corpse rise up – in fact I
rather hope I don’t! But there are all sorts of ways in which we
can have a life-giving influence on others. Poverty and injustice can
be deathly – people abandon hope, thinking the cards are
irrevocably stacked against them. But we are called to stand for life,
to overturn the barriers that obstruct God’s gifts of life-giving
justice. Environmental degradation and climate change are deathly. But
we are called to stand for life as we do what we can to protect the
biosphere – the sphere of life in all its diversity. The private
struggles of depression or loneliness are deathly too. We are called to
stand for life as we reach out to a neighbour to help them in their
need, or to let them help us in ours

People often see Christian commitment to the sanctity of life as being
the preserve only of those who campaign against abortion and
euthanasia. But life is more than mere existence. If we truly treasure
life as sacred, we need to be concerned, passionately concerned, about
its quality as well as about its length, about ensuring that all can
share in its fullness and joy, living lives of love, peace and
security.

Where God is, these stories tell us, life is. In fact, where God is,
life overflows, unstoppably. Let us pray that those around us will
recognise in us that same life-giving touch which proclaims that the
boss has shown up, God is here, and at work in his world through us.
Amen

Our two Bible readings for tonight seem at first glance to be very
different.
In the first, a Hebrew on the run from Pharaoh, living as a shepherd in
a
remote desert encounters a mysterious burning bush. In the second a
member of
the religious elite goes at dead of night through the back streets of
Jerusalem
to talk to Jesus.
Yet when we look more closely we see all sorts of parallels between
these two
stories of people meeting a God who is not as they expected him to be.
I’ve
spotted five. I’ll explain.

Let’s start at the beginning. Both encounters begin with something
strange.
Moses sees a bush which burns, but isn’t consumed. “I must turn aside
and look”
he says to himself. Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus by the signs he’s seen
and
heard too. This meeting happens straight after two startling incidents
near the
beginning of John’s Gospel – the turning of water into wine at a
wedding in
Cana and the overturning of the traders’ tables in the temple. The
first is an
immensely cheering miracle, it seems to me – unlimited wine for all! –
and the
second an immensely challenging one, as Jesus demonstrates the need for
an
overturning of the social and economic structures of the day.
Things like
these, say Nicodemus, can’t be done without the presence of God – he
has to
know more. Moses and Nicodemus both “turn aside”. Moses, from the path
on which
he is leading his flock. Nicodemus from the pathways he’s trodden as a
religious leader and teacher, sure, until now, of what he believed, but
now
wondering whether there could be more. That’s the first parallel.

The second is in the response that they make to the strangeness of what
they
find. Moses takes off his shoes. This is holy ground. It’s a puzzling
thing to
do for us – going barefoot in our culture is a sign of relaxation and
informality, not respect. But in Moses’ world it was literally a
humbling
gesture. The word humble comes from the same root as humus – the earth.
Going
barefoot meant your feet were on the ground. You were brought down to
earth;
there was no protection, no insulation between you and earthy reality.
Nicodemus, as far as we know, keeps his shoes on, but he becomes
vulnerable and
expresses humility in a different way. He has to divest himself of what
he
thinks he knows, admit ignorance, puzzlement at Jesus’ words. “Are you
a
teacher of Israel, yet you do not understand these things?” asks Jesus.
He’s
hit the nail on the head – Nicodemus hasn’t the faintest idea what
Jesus means,
and he is brought down to earth by Jesus’ straight talking. For this
clever
man, respected for his knowledge, this intellectual nakedness is
probably the
most embarrassing there could be, but unless he sheds his self-image as
a man
of knowledge, he can’t learn from Jesus.

The third of the five parallels is found in the way they both discover
a God
who is both utterly new, and yet the same as he has always been. There
is
surprise and similarity, contrast and continuity. Moses is
shocked to
find God off what he thinks is his own territory. He had grown up
with
the idea that Gods were local. But here is the God of his ancestors –
Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob – way off his patch, so to speak. Monotheism – the
belief in
only one God – develops slowly in Hebrew thought, and this is an early
stage in
its development. God isn’t stuck in his own land, he can be everywhere.
This is
very new, and yet clearly there is continuity too – this IS the God of
Abraham
Isaac and Jacob.
For Nicodemus too there is something old and something new in his
encounter
with Jesus. He is shocked at Jesus challenge to the old order, the
assumptions
of his times, and yet Nicodemus can also see that his teaching is
rooted in the
Bible, that the things he does are in line with the God who is revealed
there.

The fourth parallel illustrates that continuity. The message to Moses
and to
Nicodemus is the same. God tells Moses that he has heard and seen the
misery of
his people, slaves in Egypt, and he will act to rescue them. They have
not been
forgotten, they are not rejected or abandoned. And what is it that
Jesus says
to Nicodemus. Those, most famous words. “God so loved the world that he
sent
his only Son…”
The nations around Israel – Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians – were
quite
content to believe in gods and goddesses who were really only
interested in
their own ends, their own power struggles, who capriciously played with
humanity for their own amusement. But, apparently alone among the
nations of
the time, the God of Israel’s motivation was love. We are so used to
that that
it has perhaps lost its power to move us as it should. That is a pity,
because
it is truly awe-inspiring. “What are mortals”, as the Psalmist says
“that God
should care for us?” And yet, both these stories tell us, that is what
it is
all about. Not vengeance, not the desire to condemn, but healing,
rescue and
love for his precious creation.

The fifth and final parallel, after that glorious revelation, is that
for both
Moses and Nicodemus, getting involved in that mission of love will not
be easy.
There are struggles ahead. Moses is given a twin challenge – to
persuade
Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves leave Egypt, and then to contend with
the
tribes that already occupy the Promised Land. It is, as God points out,
the
land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the
Hivites, and the Jebusites, and they aren’t going to be pleased when a
rival
nation arrives on their doorstep. There will be trouble both getting
out of the
old land, and getting into the new.
But God says to Moses, “I have come down to deliver them”. Like a
midwife God
will be there by their side as they go through this painful and
dangerous
transition – the birth of a new nation.
You don’t get any prizes for spotting the parallel with the story of
Nicodemus
here. Jesus talks to him about new birth too, birth through water and
the
spirit, birth from above. Nicodemus is confused – how can you be born
again
when you are already full grown? But that is what he will need – a
completely
new start – if he wants to be part of building this new kingdom that
Jesus has
come to bring. Joining in the work of Jesus will mean leaving the
comfortable
world of privilege and security he has known, and aligning himself with
someone
who is already attracting hostile attention. He comes by night to see
Jesus
because he wants to remain hidden, but he will have to come out of this
womb-like darkness if he is really serious about this new life. It is a
hard
message, and Nicodemus takes a long time to find the courage he needs.
We hear
of him twice more in the Gospels. The first time we find him putting up
a
rather weak defence of Jesus in the face of the plotting of his fellow
Pharisees. “Everyone deserves a fair trial,” he says, but he doesn’t
press his
point, and it doesn’t seem to make much difference. By the time he
steps out of
the shadows, he probably feels it is too late to do any good. It is he,
in
John’s Gospel, who brings spices to anoint Jesus’ body as it is taken
down from
the cross, and helps to carry it to the tomb. It has taken the death of
Jesus
to bring him to his own new birth – a long and difficult labour indeed.

So, five parallels between these two stories. But perhaps the most
important
parallels aren’t the ones we draw between Moses and Nicodemus, but the
parallels we draw to our own lives.

Let’s go back over those five points again, and put ourselves in the
picture.

First, let’s ask, what makes us “turn aside”? What is it that draws us
to
explore faith, to contemplate God? There are signs and wonders all
around us,
challenges that call to us, but so often we walk on by, our minds
deadened by
the cares of life, or the rigid patterns of thought that we have grown
up with.
A burning bush – so what?

Second, we might ask how we might we need to “take our shoes
off”? How do
we protect ourselves from God, insulate ourselves from reality? Is our
faith
mere words, a game we play on Sunday, or do we have our feet on the
ground, our
faith connected to the reality of our lives in all their earthiness?

Thirdly, how do we check out our image of God? Are we challenged and
shocked
sometimes, or is our faith predictable and cosy? And if we think we
have met
God in a new way, is our faith deeply enough rooted, well enough
informed to
show us when we are just going completely off beam?

Fourthly, have we taken on board that our God, like the God of Moses
and
Nicodemus, still loves the world, still sees and hears its misery, and
comes to
us to act to heal and rescue? What would you long for God to see and
hear
today, in your life, in our world? And how will he answer that prayer?
Moses
was called to be part of the solution, and so are we – the ways in
which that
love and healing are expressed.

Finally, we should know that for us too, there is a struggle involved
in
finding the new life God wants for us. Birth is not easy – not for the
mother,
and not for the child either, but only a complete new beginning will
do. It
isn’t something that happens once and for all; it is a constant process
of
beginning again with God, but do we have the courage for it? Perhaps we
will
hesitate, as Nicodemus did, until it seems to us that it must be too
late. But
it is never too late with God, never too late to respond, never too
late to
change.

Five parallels. Five ways of stepping into these stories and hearing in
them
the living word – the God who is “I am” – yesterday, today and forever
– calling
out to us to turn aside, know his love, and be born again.
Amen

What does this time of year mean to you? For some it is a beautiful
time. It’s
the start of summer. The gardens are beginning to look their best; the
hedgerows are full of wild flowers. It’s a time of relaxation and ease.
But for
many others May and June mean only one thing – examinations! It’s not
just the
students taking SATs, or GCSEs, or AS levels, or A Levels, or
university exams
who get worked up. Parents and other members of the family share in
their
anxiety too, as we try to encourage and console and make it possible
for our
children to do as well as they can. And of course, for teachers, this
is the
moment when they find out whether any of what they have laboured to
teach all
year has actually sunk in.

It’s an important time, but it can also be very frustrating. A couple
of hours
in an exam room often seems a woefully inadequate way to judge how
children are
getting on. Some are better than others at cramming in a set of facts
and
churning them out on the day. Some exams only really test how good
students are
at passing exams. And we all know that some of the most valuable
lessons we
learn don’t come from text books anyway, and that no amount of exam
passes will
necessarily guarantee happiness or success or that you will lead a good
and
useful life. Passing exams doesn’t necessarily give you the skills you
really
need to become a fully rounded, emotionally mature, caring, responsible
individual, able to contribute to society. There’s far more to living
well than
simply knowing stuff, and the life-lessons which we really need don’t
usually
come quickly or easily. They take a long time and real work to master.

Of course that’s never stopped us wishing for a quick and easy route to
knowledge though. There’s a folktale by the Brother’s Grimm which tells
of a
man who is set on by robbers. They bundle him into a sack and haul him
up into
a tall tree, intending to return to kill him later. Having hung there
for a
long time in despair the man finally manages to escape by persuading a
passing
student that this sack is actually “the Sack of Knowledge” – 24 hours
in it and
you know everything! The student eagerly swaps places – here is an end
to all
that tiresome studying! And you could say it works – he learns
something almost
straight away, even if it is only that you should never believe what a
complete
stranger tied in a sack tells you…!
The story of Adam and Eve and that forbidden fruit is about the longing
for
instant knowledge as well. The fruit is the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge
of good and evil. “Eat this,” says the serpent, “and you’ll know
everything.
You’ll be just like God.” But Adam and Eve soon realise they have
bitten off
more than they can chew. Knowing good from evil is one thing, having
the wisdom
to live with that knowledge is quite another. And by grasping at
something they
weren’t ready for they have damaged the very thing that could have
helped them
– their relationship with God. Instead of feeling they can walk and
talk with
him freely as they have done before they are ashamed. They just want to
hide
from him.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge can be dangerous when we use it to try to
make
ourselves look big, or others look small, to manipulate or intimidate.
The
people of the Bible knew well that knowledge on its own wasn’t enough.
It was
wisdom we needed. Wisdom was far more than mastering facts or passing
exams,
and it didn’t come instantly. Wisdom was such an important attribute to
the
ancient Hebrews that they often spoke about it as if it actually was a
person.
They pictured it as a woman – the Hebrew word for wisdom is feminine –
and we
meet her in today’s Old Testament reading. She was there in the
beginning with
God, she says, by his side helping to put into action his creative
plans.
Wisdom was essential to everything, from making the heavens, to setting
a
boundary for the sea. And she continued to be there, delighting with
God in the
world and in the human race.

So what the people of the Old Testament are telling us is that you
don’t just
find wisdom in the pages of books, but in everyday experience, in daily
life.
We find wisdom where we are, or we don’t find it at all. We find God
where we
are, or we don’t find him at all. And this wisdom – God’s wisdom –
isn’t
something we can find in splendid isolation in an ivory tower. It’s
found in
relationship with God and with others. You can’t find wisdom on your
own, and
you can’t keep it to yourself either. It isn’t something to be hoarded
for its
own sake, as a bargaining chip to bring us power, to help us climb the
ladder
of personal success. It is there to be shared for the good of all, not
to be
owned by a few lucky individuals. God’s wisdom is for everyone, just as
God is
for everyone, not just for some intellectual elite.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when we are supposed to focus on the
strange
and puzzling idea of God as three persons but one God. That too is
often
something that people feel is just for the elite – theologians with too
much
time on their hands and more brains than is good for them. It’s
tempting to
relegate the whole business of the Trinity to a dusty shelf somewhere,
like a
book we meant to read but never quite got past the first few pages of.
But that
is a great shame, because the Trinity is really all about experience,
not
book-learning; real life, not abstract theology. The Trinity is
Christianity’s
way of trying to talk about God in the here and now, God for everyone,
just as
the people of the Old Testament had tried to talk about that same
experience
using that active creative figure of Wisdom, who showed them God at
work in the
world.

They were convinced that they met God as they learned to live wisely
and well,
because it was only from God that true wisdom came. The early
Christians
felt that they had met God too, and had seen God’s effects in their
lives. They
had met God in the person of Jesus. They had met God in their
experience of the
Holy Spirit, who gave them strength and joy. They already knew God as
Creator
and loving parent, but now they knew him in these other ways as well.
The idea
of the Trinity was the best they could do to express that sense of
God’s
presence with them in the reality of everyday life. They didn’t worry
about the
philosophy until much later – what they knew about was the experiences
they
had, experiences through which they learned and grew. These were
experiences of
wisdom just like those of their ancestors. Jesus talks about the Spirit
of
Truth, guiding us into truth in today’s Gospel. God in experience,
bringing us
wisdom. St Paul talks of God who is found even in suffering, suffering
which
produced endurance, endurance character, and character a hope that
doesn’t
disappoint us. God in experience, bringing us wisdom.

The Trinity can sound horribly complicated, but it is actually very
simple – it
is a way of describing an experience, an experience that we can all
have. We
can all meet God in our everyday lives, as we learn and grow in his
wisdom, the
wisdom that enables us to live as his children, doing his work, loving
others,
creating justice and peace in his world.

It is simple to understand, but, of course, that doesn’t mean that this
wisdom
is easily come by; there is certainly nothing painless or instant about
it. It
will take much more than 24 hours in a sack of knowledge, or a bite of
an
apple. This path to wisdom will take as long as it takes, and
will almost
certainly involve sacrifice and suffering.

No wonder we feel frustrated that our schools can’t manage to wave a
magic wand
over our children and turn them into the model citizens that we would
like –
happy, healthy, responsible, and wise. The expectation is quite
unrealistic.
Becoming the people God wants us to be takes a lifetime and involves
the whole
community as we shape each other in all the things we do. It’s not just
about
academic values, but spiritual values too. It’s not just about what
happens in
school, but what happens at home, what happens in church, what happens
in our
neighbourhoods, and what happens in the wider world. It isn’t just
learnt
through formal teaching but through the examples we set, the things we
spend
our money on, the principles we live by. The best teacher in the best
school in
the world can’t work miracles with our children, teaching them love,
courage
and trust if the rest of their society is teaching them hatred, fear
and
suspicion.

Trinity Sunday is the beginning of the long Trinity Season – twenty
something
weeks, all through the summer and early autumn. It’s by far the longest
season
in the church’s year. But it needs to be long, because the emphasis in
this
season isn’t on the exciting events of the Christian story - the birth,
death
and resurrection of Christ. It is on the slow steady work of God
among
us; the God whom we meet day by day as we learn to do justly, love
mercy and
walk humbly with him.
Amen.

Important people, do you know any either personally or otherwise?
People like
to be seen with important people because by association they must be
pretty
important themselves mustn’t they?

If I go to meet a business owner and find myself the other side of a
vast desk,
usually on a smaller and lower chair than theirs, I can virtually
guarantee
that they will have at least one photograph in their office of them
with
someone the public perceive to be important, usually Bush, Blair, or
occasionally Thatcher for those more senior in years.

I guess I should guard against assuming all such people have an
insatiable
desire for power themselves as I don’t know the background to these
associations. The other factor is that we are all guilty of expressing
our self
importance from time to time and there can be a fine line between
telling
people who we are and what we do as opposed to how important we are.

Please forgive me if you’ve heard this before but I think we would all
consider
the Pope to be a pretty important person.

Well he was on a tour in the US going around in this amazing limo and
at the
end of the day he says to his chauffeur ‘I’m pretty fed up riding
around in the
back of this limo all the time how about you get in the back and let me
have a
go at driving this amazing vehicle. Nervously the chauffeur swops seats
and the
Pope starts to open up the vehicle on an empty freeway, 60, 70, 80, 90,
95
miles per hour and just as he is thinking how the vehicle picks up
speed
without one noticing he sees the flashing blue lights in his wing
mirror.

The motorbike cop waves the vehicle over and walks towards the drivers’
window
with a stern look on hid face, a look which turns to one of amazement
when he
sees who’s driving. ‘Just a minute Sir’ he says as he turns away to
radio his
commander. ‘I’ve just pulled over someone very important, not too sure
what to
do here.’ ‘Important you say, who is it the state governor?’ ‘No, more
important than that’. ‘Not the Presidents wife again?’ ‘No more
important.’
‘Surely, not the President himself?’ ‘No more important than that.’
‘That’s
simply not possible; tell me who it is the commander demanded’. The
traffic cop
replied in a rather shaky voice, ‘Actually, to be honest I’m not quite
sure,
but let’s put it this way, the pope is his chauffeur!’
I acknowledge credit to the Dean of Rochester (Adrian Newman) for that
theological illustration of how we relate to important people. When you
open
the back door to this car and see the man in uniform would you consider
the
chauffeur an important person?

Well he would probably have more in common with those God considers
important
than those who seek celebrity by association. Over and over again God
chooses
people to do his work who are at best ordinary, but often apparently
inappropriate or inadequate for their great task.

Pentecost is the contrast to the story of the Tower of Babel where
people want
to make a name for themselves, that story tells us that a desire for
power and
arrogant determination to be self reliant divides us from each other
and from
God.

If we have doubts about ourselves, our relationship with God and our
future
we’re more likely to turn to God and ask for help.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus tells his disciples in John’s gospel that the
world
cannot receive the spirit of truth. Perhaps the world is too obsessed
with what
has become important to it, its own truth, its own crazy
self-authenticating
systems to receive the Spirit whose job it is to unite us with the
Father and
the Son. It’s up to each of us if we want to be in the world or of the
world.

‘Designer goods’ has become a description we would associate with
things of the
world Luis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci etc. maybe it’s time for us to remind
ourselves we are the original designer goods, made in the image of God,
knitted
together in our mother’s womb, people with a real purpose.

Beneath our public persona, deeper than the messy reality of our
private lives,
at our innermost core, our very being, lies the fact that God made us
and loves
all that he has made. Because of this he sent us the Holy Spirit and
the
shocking truth is that there is real possibility that we could be the
very
people to fulfill the words of Christ when he
said ’ …the one who believes in me will
also do
the works that I do…’

If we are people who are open to receive the Holy Spirit, I would have
thought
that like me you have some difficulty putting your finger on exactly
what it
(or should that be he or she) actually is. In Acts Luke speaks of the
Spirit
being ‘like the rush of a violent wind’ and of ‘divided tongues as of
fire’
there is a sense that he is struggling to find words which absolutely
define
the experience. Maybe that’s because we like to categorise, to
logically
explain all things that we struggle so much and I believe that the
Spirit goes
way beyond this. After all much of Jesus teaching was through stories
capable
of more than one interpretation.

This is not a ‘cop out’ for trying to know if the Spirit is real for
us. We can
lazily dismiss any evidence or we can accept our vulnerability and
experience
the fact that the Spirit has the power to bring unity and restore
communication
where it has been lost.

I read recently of an American lady who in the midst of studying for a
theology
degree was struck down with ovarian cancer. Her inadequate medical
insurance
meant she couldn’t cover her cost of treatment so members of her parish
and her
daughter’s school held a fundraiser on her behalf. She described the
joyful
mayhem that filled the house where the event was held and of her
irrepressible
conviction that every person present that night had something like a
tongue of
fire or a halo above their head. The spiritual heat shining out from
them was
as palpable as any CAT scan or MRI. They were on fire with love.

And as this lady experienced the Spirit is still making a difference in
people’s lives today. For those who allow the Spirit to move them this
could be
the difference between greedily taking or thinking how we can give,
between
accepting the status quo or searching for ways we can challenge
injustice,
between seeing a future which is bleakly certain or gloriously possible.

As we struggle to understand the Spirit we can go off in any direction
but find
ourselves coming back to love. The same thing happens when we try to
understand
God the search brings us back to his love for us up and his son gave up
his own
life upon the cross in the greatest act of love the world has ever
known.

Why was it that so many could understand each other at Pentecost?
Perhaps it’s
because the common language spoken was the language of love.

When we take time to think about it we may realise that we have had our
own
Pentecost experience, the birth of a child, a relationship restored, a
new
insight or understanding.
If we can leave ourselves open to the Spirit there will be more to come.

This Pentecost let’s give thanks for the times we have seen the Holy
Spirit in
our lives and invite her to be a constant presence in each one of us
and this
church as we look forward to our future.

One of our earliest and deepest fears is the fear of abandonment. For a
small
child it can literally be the difference between life and death. Left
alone,
you simply can’t survive. For a long time we need adults around us who
understand the world and can protect us.

“Leave us not comfortless.”
There is a sense in which we probably never grow out of that fear of
being left
alone, with no one to care about us or notice us. We can cope with all
sorts of
troubles if only we feel we aren’t alone with them. A friend, a
partner, a
child or parent – often they don’t have to do anything or have any
clever
ideas; they just have to be there.

“Leave us not comfortless…” The comfort we long for isn’t just
the
relaxation of a cosy armchair by the fire, but comfort in the oldest
sense of
the word - a presence that strengthens, that “fortifies” us, making us
strong.

This sort of comfort was something the early followers of Jesus needed
badly.
They faced a huge task – to take the message of Christ to the ends of
the
earth. It was a task they were to do in the midst of persecution. Yet
they were
essentially no different to us – not superheroes. The story we heard
from Acts
is a typical view of the kind of turmoil they faced. Paul and Silas
arrive at
Ephesus and soon their message has started changing lives. They bring
good
news, but they bring colossal disruption too. A slave girl is healed, a
jailer
finds new hope, but in the process Paul and Silas make powerful
enemies, and
find themselves in prison as well. We perhaps look on people like Paul
and
Silas as full of courage, in a way we couldn’t ever aspire to, but my
guess is
that they were probably just as scared as we would be. And yet somehow,
somewhere they find the strength, the comfort, that we all long for,
strength
even to sing and pray in the dead of night in their prison cells,
rather than
huddling in a corner and crying, as I suspect I would.

Where does that strength come from? Paul and Silas draw it from each
other, of
course. Jesus knew what he was doing when he prayed that we might be
one. We
need each other. God’s love often comes to us through people who know
us and
love us. But they only have that love and support to give because they
also
know it individually. They have discovered that the same God who raised
Jesus
from death – who did not leave him comfortless, in the darkness of the
tomb,
even when all seemed lost – is with them too. As Paul puts it in his
letter to
the Romans, “neither death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor
anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God
in
Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This Sunday we stand between two important festivals - Ascension and
Pentecost.
Ascension, when we recall how Jesus’ earthly ministry finished, on a
hill
outside Jerusalem as he was taken up into heaven, leaving his disciples
gazing
up into what must have seemed an endless, empty sky, and Pentecost,
when the
truth that Paul will one day express so powerfully first dawns on them.
God has
not left them at all. In his Spirit he is present in a new way in their
lives.
It’s a realisation that takes a while to come though, and that’s
probably true
of us too as we wait for the things we long for – healing, forgiveness,
meaning, the sense that we matter and are cared for.

“Leave us not comfortless” we pray. Just like the disciples we can
often find
ourselves looking around into what seems like an empty space, longing
for
strength to meet challenges that seem beyond us. But the good news is
the same
now as it was then – the God whom we wait for is already here. Nothing
can
separate us from him, except perhaps our own closed eyes, ears and
hearts. His
presence may not be as we expect – it certainly wasn’t for those
stunned
disciples at Pentecost. He may not do what we expect, or give us what
we ask
for, but the God who did not abandon Christ to the darkness of the tomb
will
not abandon us either.
In the silence, we pray, both for ourselves and for others, “leave us
not
comfortless”, and we wait for the knowledge that our prayer is already
answered. Amen.

May 13th
2007
Easter 6John 5.1-9
I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t want you to tell me the
answer. I just
want you to ponder it for yourselves. If you could change something in
your
life, what would it be? Now, I want to be a bit specific here – I don’t
want
you to think of something completely impossible or beyond your control,
like
being 21 again if that day is long past, or winning the lottery. Think
of
something that you could, theoretically at least, achieve. A change at
work, or
in a relationship. A new skill. Deepening your knowledge. Sorting out
some
problem that has beset you – giving up smoking, drinking less. Praying
more,
living out your faith, doing something for someone else.

I’m going to give you a moment of quiet to think of something in your
life that
you’d really like to be different, that you really want.

Silence

I hope you’ve all thought of something. Now I’m going to give you
another short
time of silence to ask yourself the question, “if that’s what I want,
why
hasn’t it happened, why haven’t I done it? What’s stopping me from
doing it?
What is getting in the way?”

Silence

The man in our Gospel reading today was well aware of what he wanted to
change.
He’d been ill for 38 years. 38 years! What were you doing 38 years ago
– in
1969? Perhaps you weren’t even born then. For all that time this man
had been
ill with something – we don’t know what. Eventually he had come to a
pool in
Jerusalem, where miracles were believed to happen. Some early
manuscripts
include an extra verse which explains it a bit more. Every now and an
angel
disturbed the waters, it was thought, and whoever got into them first
after
this would be healed. So the crowds of the sick waited and waited, and
when the
moment came they all rushed forward, hoping to be the lucky one. We
might think
the NHS is a bit of a lottery, but it was nothing compared to this.

This man had been there a long time, but somehow his chance never came.
He was
still lying there when Jesus came to the pool, and noticed him, and
spoke to
him. “Do you want to be made well?” he asked. What a ridiculous
question –
insulting really. Of course he wants to be made well, doesn’t he? Why
else
would he be lying by this pool?

But that’s where this story gets interesting, because the man doesn’t
answer
Jesus’ question at all. Instead he comes straight back with what
sounds
like a well-rehearsed response. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the
pool
when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone
else steps
down ahead of me.” It’s as if he hasn’t heard what Jesus said at all.
He leaps
straight to the obstacles. Whether he wants it or not is neither here
nor
there.

It’s an odd response and it raises all sorts of questions. Why does it
seem so
impossible to him that he will be healed? Why is he torturing himself
with
longing for something that actually he doesn’t believe he will ever
get. If
he’s so sure he can’t get into this pool in time, why linger there?

We can’t know for sure what is going on in his head, but here are some
things
that seem relevant to me.
Firstly, he seems completely focused on this pool and its healing
powers – this
is the only solution he is considering. He doesn’t ask Jesus whether he
can
help him in some other way. If he can’t get down into these waters at
the
crucial moment, he can’t be healed. He can’t give up and move on,
because it is
this or nothing, but every failure deepens his conviction that it won’t
be him.

Secondly, he believes his healing is all in the hands of others. “There
is no
one to put me in the pool…” It is nothing to do with him. It is all to
do with
them. Maybe it seems a little unfair to criticise him for this. His
life is
hard, he can’t move easily. He probably feels isolated and lonely. But
I
suspect that blaming others, locating his problems outside himself, is
something he would do anyway. If we read on in the Gospels we discover
that
after he has been healed he comes in for stern criticism from the local
Pharisees. Jesus has told him to take up his mat and walk, but it is
the
Sabbath. No one is allowed to work then, so they come down on him like
a ton of
bricks. And what does he do? He blames Jesus – he told him to do it. He
deflects their anger onto the one who has delivered him from his
misery. He’s
in trouble; but it is someone else’s fault.

Thirdly, I suspect that Jesus’ question hits the nail on the head. Does
he want
to be healed? In one sense, yes, of course. But being healed will mean
a huge
change in his life. After 38 years of disability, what will he do? He
has
probably got by by begging. How will he live now? It might sound odd to
suggest
this, but even change for the better can be stressful and challenging.
We get
used to our lives the way they are, even if the way they are looks far
from
perfect.

It might seem very unChristian, ungenerous, unpriestly of me to make
all these
criticisms of this poor man. After all, how would I cope with 38 years
of
disability? Probably no better than he did. But I think it is important
to see
these things and to say these things, because it isn’t just this man
who
behaves like this, who lingers at the place of healing, but somehow is
never
quite able to take the plunge. It isn’t just this man who sees the
obstacles
instead of the opportunities. I think it is something we all do – I can
certainly see it in myself. We do it in our personal lives and in our
life
together as a church, and globally too. And the reasons are the same.
We get
fixated on one solution, trying the same thing over and over again,
using each
failure as proof to ourselves that the change we want is impossible. “I
tried
that; it didn’t work!” We locate the problems elsewhere – it’s all
someone
else’s fault. “I’m ok, it’s all the others that are the problem.” We
look at
the disruption that change will bring and decide that, actually, it
might be
out of the frying pan and into the fire. We’d rather stay as we are.

Efforts to tackle something like global warming are a prime
example. We
know we ought to do something, but so often inertia seems to rule. It’s
all
down to governments, or the USA or China – what difference can I make?
To sort
it out we’d have to give things up, go without – it would all cost too
much.
Do we want the world to be made well?
“Yes… but…” we say, helplessly.

The obstacles we raise often have foundation in reality of course.
Other people
can make it hard for us to change, and we can do the same to them. We
label, we
stereotype, we fail to support, we give up on people, and so they give
up on
themselves. The Pharisees who soured this man’s new life with their
petty
criticisms remind us that we often weigh people down with senseless
restrictions too. Just before Easter you may remember that I asked for
donations to help a young girl who had had to leave home, and was being
supported by the Bridge Trust in Tonbridge. She was trying to finish a
college
course, but the convoluted funding system available to young single
homeless
people meant that it looked as if she wouldn’t be able to continue. I’m
glad to
say that you responded with wonderful generosity. I sent nearly
£300 on our
behalf and I’m sure others in the area were just as generous, but it
makes me
angry that as a society we make it so hard for young people in this
position as
they try to build themselves a life.

But ultimately it is Hannah’s own determination to make a go of her
life which
is the crucial factor in her journey, and the same is true for all of
us. Our
journey through life is our journey. It is made with God, and supported
by
others too, but it is our journey, and our feet that must make it. Our
lives
are our gift to us from God, placed into our hands, for us to live, and
whatever difficulties others place in our way, the most powerful
obstacles to
our growth are almost always the ones we come up with ourselves.

If you’re struggling with something right now, I don’t want you for one
moment
to think that I am blaming you for it. I’m not. We are all living in a
tangled
world, tied up in knots that are not of our own making, suffering from
ills
that have roots far beyond our own lives. It’s not your fault if bad
things
happen to you. But we do have choices about how we respond to those
troubles.
God wants us to find freedom and growth. That might mean healing. It
might mean
being delivered from your difficulties. It might equally mean learning
to live
with them creatively and with a sense of peace. But however much
God
wants us to find that freedom, we won’t unless we want it too.

In the end this man is healed not by an angel stirring up the waters.
That has
been a complete blind alley for him. He is healed when he responds to
Jesus’
challenge to him. “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” It seems to me to
be a
greater challenge even than being first in the pool. Perhaps it is only
surprise that enables him to do it. Perhaps it is something that he’s
never
tried, so he hasn’t had a chance to reject it. Whatever it is, it
reminds us
that we need to do the same. Stand up. Pick up your mat - stop resting
on those
old obstacles, those old excuses - and take a step forward into God’s
future
for you.

People
sometimes say to me, as they struggle with some dilemma or other, “if
only God
would speak to me and give me an answer I could understand – then I’d
know what
to do”. I sympathise. It seems as if it would make everything simpler
if we
could hear some clear unequivocal guidance, or see some message written
in the
sky in shining letters– do this, don’t do that, go here, don’t go
there. But I
wonder whether the voice of God would really be as welcome as we think.

St.
Peter hears it loud and clear in today’s first reading - and to be
honest it
sounds like he wishes he hadn’t.

He
was in Joppa, on the coast, he says, as he recounts this tale to other
church
leaders. He‘d gone up onto the roof to pray. We know from the full
version of
this story a little earlier in the book of Acts that it was midday, and
that
Peter was hungry. As he prayed he had a vision. Coming down out of
heaven was a
sheet, full of animals. Peter was like most people who live close to
the land.
When he looked at a lamb he thought “mint sauce”. When he looked at a
fish he
thought “a nice crispy batter and a squeeze of lemon” Animals meant
food – and
he was hungry. But as he looked more closely into the sheet, he
recoiled in
disgust. The animals in the sheet were all ones which the Jewish faith
called
unclean. The laws he’d grown up with were strict and specific. No pork,
no
shellfish, no meat cooked in milk. They weren’t allowed vultures,
reptiles or
bats either, and we would probably agree with them there! But that’s
the point,
really. Cultures differ. Things which are a delicacy to one society are
disgusting to another. The reasons for those different choices
might not
be obvious, but nonetheless they will be deeply rooted, and almost
instinctive.
How about dog or horse for Sunday lunch today? There’s scientific
reason why
not, but my guess is I’ve put some of you off your dinner even
suggesting it.

We
might not understand all the prohibitions laid down in Peter’s Jewish
upbringing, but we can understand his feelings as he looked into this
sheet
hoping to find something edible. But just as he backed off in with his
stomach
churning he heard a voice. “Get up, Peter; kill and eat”.

What
is he supposed to do? “By no means, Lord…” he answers. It’s a
fascinating
response, because it captures perfectly Peters’ disorientation and
confusion.
He calls this voice “Lord”. He knows it is God’s voice, though the
story hasn’t
actually said it is. But he isn’t going to do what it says. As I said
at the
beginning, hearing the voice of God might not be as simple or as
comforting as
we first suppose.

If
this is God he has every right to tell Peter what to do – he is Lord –
Peter
says so himself. But eating these animals is against the law – law that
he has
grown up believing that God himself gave. “You can’t tell me to eat
these
things, God, because the Scriptures – your Word – tell me that I
can’t.” Psychologists
call moments like this “cognitive dissonance” – when you come up
against
something that you know can’t really be as it seems, and yet there it
is, right
in front of you. Like an optical illusion, which seems to shift before
your
eyes, or a moment when someone you know really well does something
completely
out of character. This sort of moment can leave us feeling as if the
ground is
moving beneath our feet, as if the world no longer makes sense. It’s
profoundly
disorientating and disturbing. That’s what Peter’s feeling as he
acknowledges
God’s Lordship, but can’t bring himself to do as he asks.

Eventually
the vision vanishes, with Peter still refusing to do what God has told
him. And
just at that point he has some visitors. A group of men arrive, sent by
a Roman
Centurion called Cornelius. Cornelius wants to see him, to find out
more about
Jesus, and how he can follow him. We might think Peter would be glad to
go.
He’ll be spreading the message, and to a powerful man at that. But
Cornelius is
a Gentile and in Peter’s book visiting a Gentile is just as revolting a
prospect as eating pork sausages or prawn cocktails or deep fried bat.
It is
just plain wrong. Gentiles were Gentiles and Jews were Jews – each had
their
own place, and they should keep to it. Going to their houses! Sharing
their
food! Yuk!

Suddenly
Peter knows why he had that vision - it was nothing to do with what he
was
going to eat for lunch. It was all to do with preparing him for this
moment. A
turning point, a vital moment. If Peter hadn’t gone, if he and others
in the
early church hadn’t overcome their disgust and their deep, instinctive
feeling
that they were doing something dangerous and disloyal to their culture,
we
would probably not be here. The Christian faith would have remained a
minority
sect of Judaism, and probably would have quickly died out in the chaos
of the
destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people. But
somehow
they found the faith to believe that God could call them beyond the
limits they
thought he himself had set and the deep seated prejudices that they
thought
were just the natural order of things, and do something completely new
and
unexpected.

Peter
goes to Cornelius. He swallows his disgust and goes to take the good
news to
someone whom he thinks is without God. That is probably challenge
enough, but
he has even more to cope with when he gets there. He arrives in this
supposedly
god-forsaken house with its uncircumcised, pork eating inhabitants who
hardly
even know the rules , never mind keeping them, and finds that God is
already
there – as much at home with Cornelius as he is with Peter. Cornelius
and his
household are filled with God’s Spirit, just as Peter had been on the
day of
Pentecost. Peter thinks he is helping Cornelius to discover God that
day, but
actually it is the other way around. It is Peter who really has the
revelation,
Peter who learns the most shocking and liberating lesson.

Love
one another as I have loved you, says Jesus to his disciples. But how
has he
loved us? First and foremost he has loved us by being here - where we
are,
whoever we are. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” the early
church
proclaimed. God has always been free to go where he wills, but in
Christ he
demonstrates that beyond doubt. In Christ God breaks free of the box we
think
we have put him in, safely confined to heaven, or to the Temple, or to
the
church, or to those who are like us, or those who seem good and
respectable to
us. And he dwells among us, as he likes, where he likes, in whom he
likes. Our
task is not, as Peter tries to do, to tell God what his own rules ought
to be.
“By no means, Lord…!” Our task is not to police his boundaries for him,
or
guard his holiness – he can do that himself if he wants to. Our task is
to
learn to see him even in what seem like the most unlikely people and
situations.

We
are called to live as Easter people – people full of God’s new life –
but it is
hard work, and often uncomfortable. Easter isn’t all spring flowers and
sunshine. Just as the chick must fight its way out of the egg, breaking
the
shell open bit by bit, we often have to fight our way out of the
confines of
old ideas and prejudices. But when we do we will find that God is
already
there, in the place which we thought was off limits, because nowhere is
off
limits to him.

We
are called to a great “God hunt” – a hunt that should confront us and
challenge
us, as well as delighting us. God calls us to seek him and find him
where he
is, not just where we think he ought to be. That might mean looking at
others
with new eyes – especially those with whom we disagree or of whom we
disapprove
- and asking, “where is God in this person?” What would happen if we
could do
that when we looked at the terrorist, or the child abuser, or the
person who
has hurt us personally in some way? What would happen if we thought of
them
first as God’s dwelling place? We might not feel any better about them
or what
they have done, but it would surely mean that we couldn’t treat them as
if they
didn’t matter, as if they weren’t really human, as if they could be
disposed of
like rubbish.

Joining
the great God hunt might mean looking at some situation in our lives
which we
think is insoluble, or beyond hope with new eyes too and asking, “where
is God
in this situation?” It won’t make our difficulty or our sadness go
away, but as
we find God in the midst of the brokenness we will learn to value even
the
toughest times as holy places – times full of the grace and wisdom of
God.

There
is much in this world, and in our own lives that might make us want to
recoil
in horror, or turn away in disgust. But the uncomfortable voice of God
challenges us not to do that. Instead he calls to us to come on a great
God
hunt, to seek him and find him, even in places we could never have
imagined he
might be. He calls us to love one another, to love our world, to love
ourselves
as his dwelling place, the place where he is at home, the place where
he is at
work, to heal and to recreate us.Amen

There’s
a lovely detail in the reading we heard from Acts today,
which always makes me laugh. Perhaps it shouldn’t, because it is really
a very
sad story about death. But we all know that tears and laughter are
often close
together.

Dorcas
has died. She is one of those ladies who is the salt of the earth. She
is a
pillar of the local community, kind and generous. If you’ve got a
problem,
Dorcas will sort it out. Every church has people like this – this
church
included. They are gold dust.

But
Dorcas has died. Everyone is stunned – they can’t bear to think it has
happened. They send for Peter, who is nearby. They don’t really say
what they
expect him to do about it, but they want him there anyway. When Peter
arrives
he is taken upstairs, to the room where her body has been laid out. And
straightaway all the other women surround him, weeping and wailing –
and this
is the detail I love – waving at him the clothes Dorcas had made. “How
can she
be dead?” they seem to be saying – “when she did such beautiful
needlework!”
I’ve never heard of there being an exception to the laws of mortality
for those
who can sew a straight hem or a neat buttonhole, but death does strange
things
to our sense of logic.

I
remember once, when I was away on holiday with a church group, having
to break
the sad news that one of the congregation back at home had died. She
was the
equivalent of Dorcas in that church, a much-loved lady – and I knew
that people
would be shocked.Gently
and carefully, as they arrived back from an afternoon out, I told them
that Dot
had died. “But she can’t have died,” said one woman loudly, “I’ve just
bought
her a present!” Fortunately when she thought about it she saw the funny
side of
what she had said, just as Dot would have done. But I’ve never
forgotten it.
Death can seem such a shocking, unbelievable interruption of the normal
order
of things, that people’s first reactions are often not logical at all.

But
that sort of shocked disbelief tells us something important, I think,
about
what it means to be human – just as the widows’ reaction to Dorcas’
death does.
Something
like 150,000
people die
every day in the world. Yet each of those deaths is a real person, with
a life
story, friends, family, children, parents, hopes and dreams,
achievements and
failures. Each one of those 150,000 is unique. They may not be famous,
they may
never have done anything on a grand scale, but to their friends and
families
they matter completely. They leave a hole in the world that can’t be
filled.
Anyone who has lost someone close to them will know how that feels.

Dot,
the lady whom I knew, was an inspiration to many – she changed people’s
lives
by her loving manner towards them. Dorcas too, was a one-off. Who else
was
going to fulfil the kind of ministry she had? How could she be dead?

Dorcas’
story, of course, doesn’t end there. Peter prays, and she is restored
to life.
I don’t know how that happens, and in a way it doesn’t matter. The
point I want
to make is the same whether she lives or dies. We don’t know anything
else of
her beyond this story, but it’s clear that to those who knew her she
was
irreplaceable. She took seriously what Jesus had said, “whenever you
clothed
the least of one of my brothers and sisters you clothed me.” It may not
seem
like the most dramatic of ministries – no public acclaim, no clever
words – but
because of her people who had nothing but rags were given the dignity
of
clothes made with care, the naked and the cold were wrapped in love.
Her
ministry made a difference. It mattered, and so did she.

In
a
sense the reading from the book of Revelation carries the same message
– a
message of the importance of each individual.St
John pictures a great multitude. There are so many that no one could
count
them. One of the elders seated on the throne asks John, “Who are
these?” “You
know who they are, “says John, and sure enough the elder answers,
“these are
they who have come out of the great ordeal.” John
wrote at a time when many Christians were ferociously persecuted for
their
faith. He had been exiled to the barren island of Patmos himself. He
knew that
many of those he loved had been killed by the Roman authorities, often
in
brutal and degrading ways that had stripped them of their dignity and
humanity.
Totalitarian regimes like the Roman Empire know well that the most
effective
way of subjugating others is to regard them as less than human, reduce
them to
a number. It’s what the Nazis did in the concentration camps, quite
literally,
and survivors still bear those numbers today. The Romans did this by
treating
dissidents as disposable fodder for their horrific games, pitting them
against
wild animals, or against each other, for the entertainment of the
crowds. Many
of them probably died wondering whether their sacrifice had all been
pointless,
thinking that they were as worthless as the Roman authorities said they
were.
But this passage from the book of Revelation sets that straight. The
verdict of
the Roman authorities on them was not the last word, and it was not the
truth.
In God’s eyes they mattered absolutely and utterly. They weren’t
nameless
corpses, torn to pieces by lions. They were a white robed assembly,
given
places of honour in the heavenly courts. They were loved, just as
Dorcas was,
just as Dot was, as precious, irreplaceable individuals.

They
weren’t just anonymous victims. Each one was different and unique.
Their
stories were known, their names and needs were known. God knew and
cared for
them like a shepherd, in life and in death. He was going to wipe every
tear
from their eyes. I don’t know if you’ve ever wiped away someone else’s
tears -
if you are parent you probably have. It’s not something you can do en
masse.
You can’t just take a general swipe at it. It is something you have to
do up
close and one eye at a time, one person at a time. That is what God
does – each
one is an individual to him.

St
John, wants his battered and persecuted people to know that in God’s
eyes each
one of them, with their unique gifts and callings, matters. What they
do
matters – for good or ill – even if they seem to themselves like ants
in a
world of giants. Who they are matters – even if they are treated as if
they are
nothing. Their tears matter, and God himself wipes them away.

Ours
stories will probably never be as dramatic as theirs. We may never have
to face
the challenges they did, but we can still easily feel that what we do
is of
little consequence, and that we don’t really matter. The little good
that we do
here and there is of no significance in the world. The little bad deeds
here
and there really don’t do too much damage. We don’t express our
opinions,
because who’s going to listen to us? We don’t offer our gifts, because
there’s
nothing special about them. I’m sure many women could sew just as well
as
Dorcas – it would have been easy for her to just think that they would
do the
job of clothing others better than her.

We
don’t have to be in the kind of desperate situation that St John’s
people were
to need to hear the truth about ourselves. The truth that the good we
do can
really help, and the bad we do can really hinder. We are unique, and we
need to
know that and take responsibility for it – using our gifts for the good
of
others. Every single one of us makes a difference to the course of the
world –
whether we mean to or not, for good or ill.

So
what makes you irreplaceable? What is your unique gift? And how are you
using
it? Do you really think you can make a difference anywhere? I don’t
know how
you might answer those questions for yourselves, but it is important
that we
take them seriously, because each of us matters to God, to the world,
to the
church, to one another.

After
this service we’ll have a chance to see an example of this in action
when we
hold our Annual Parish Meeting. It might seem like a bit of bureaucracy
– a
dull requirement to be got through as quickly as possible. I can’t
promise that
it will be exciting! But in its way it embodies in real terms those
precious
truths that today’s Bible readings tell us. We’ll be hearing about the
real
nitty-gritty work of the church, and iwe'll be electing those who will
be on
the Church Council for the coming year. We don’t have a post for a
dressmaker
in chief, like Dorcas, but the people who volunteer to serve on the
Council,
and all the others who give time and effort to the practical work of
the
church, in small ways and in great, are the Dorcases of our
congregation. Many
of them probably don’t think they are anything special, but if they
weren’t
there, quietly working away the whole enterprise of this church would
fall
apart at the seams.

The
message for us today is that each of us can bring love and hope to
others,
whether that is in church, at home or at work. Each of us is called to
offer
ourselves and our gifts for the good of others. Dorcas brought her
needlework –
what will we bring?Amen

There’s
a wonderful children’s book – a real classic – which I suspect many
parents and
children here will have come across. It’s called Rosie’s
Walk, by Pat Hutchins.It’s
not long, and it’s not complicated, so I shall read it to you.

Rosie
the hen went for a walk, across the yard, around the pond, over the
haycock,
past the mill, through the fence, under the beehives, and got back in
time for
dinner.

OK
-
It’s not exactly Shakespeare, so why do I view this as a classic – a
book no
child should miss out on?

It
is
because while the words roll smoothly on, the pictures tell another
story
entirely. What we know is that Rosie is being followed by a large,
hungry
looking fox. She’s blissfully ignorant of him, but we know he’s there.
On every
page he almost catches her, but fortunately, just in the nick of time
something
happens to thwart him. A rake springs up to hit him, he falls in the
pond, a
bag of flour drops on him, and finally a swarm of enraged bees chases
him away.
Rosie is none the wiser; it’s just been a pleasant stroll to her, but
we know
how close she has been to death and disaster on that day, and how lucky
her
escape has been.

The
story works on lots of levels. It’s a great “look behind you!” suspense
story
for children, but I suspect it also has a subtle message for parents
too. We
want our children to be able, like Rosie, to stroll through life never
disturbed by its troubles and sorrows. We want to protect our children
from
harm. But this book reminds us that the world is full of foxes –
dangers
lurking in unexpected places – and that actually, although Rosie gets
away with
it in this story, it is only by a series of lucky chances. Life is
fragile.
We’d rather our children knew nothing of sadness, but it’s not always
going to
be possible – or wise – to wrap them in cotton wool. Ignorance may not
always
be bliss.

This
occurred to me with new force this week as I watched the news reports
from
Virginia, following the shooting of so many students and staff there.
The shock
on the faces of the students who had escaped, the students who had
shared
classes or accommodation with the gunman, young people, many of whom
had
probably never encountered death before – was plain. And it was every
parent’s
nightmare. “We expect our schools and colleges to be places where our
children
can learn safely…” they said.

Any
loving parent wants to keep their children safe. We want to keep
ourselves safe
too. No one welcomes danger, mess, or brokenness. But the awful
discovery that
many parents and students made this week is that nowhere is truly safe.
Pain,
grief and loss are part of life. They come to us sooner or later,
however
careful we are. Our desire to protect ourselves and our children
by
hiding from this, strolling on like Rosie in blissful ignorance will
not, in
the end, help us. If we are going to live fully and with true courage
it is
better that we should turn around and face the foxes that stalk us,
coming to
terms with what it feels like to be afraid and alone, hurting and
confused.

Today’s
readings give us two pictures of courage like that – courage that knows
the
risks and chooses to face them. Ananias is a Christian living in
Damascus. I’ve
always thought that he is one of the bravest people in the Bible. It is
just a
few years after the death and resurrection of Jesus – very early days
for the
church. Groups of Jesus’ followers have begun to gather in towns and
cities,
but it is dangerous for them. The Roman authorities are suspicious of
this new
movement, and the Jewish authorities see it as heresy, something they
are duty
bound to stamp out. The leading figure in their persecution is Saul of
Tarsus,
a clever Pharisee, learned in the law and ruthless in his opposition to
Jesus’
followers. He has had Christians arrested, imprisoned, beaten, probably
killed.
He sets off for Damascus on a mission to find and destroy Jesus’
followers
there. They know he’s coming – perhaps it is no secret – he wants them
to know
and to tremble.

But
on the way a strange thing happens. There are bright lights in the sky,
Saul
falls to the ground, blinded, and he hears a voice, the voice of Jesus,
asking
“why do you persecute me…?” Suddenly he realises that he has got it
wrong, that
following Christ is not a dangerous perversion of the truth, but the
way to
life and peace. Baffled, confused, shaken, he is led into the city.

And
that’s where Ananias comes in. He is minding his own business, keeping
his head
down, when God speaks. “There’s a man in the city that needs healing –
go and
visit him, Ananias”. “Ok, Lord, who is he?” “His name is Saul of
Tarsus.” “Saul
of Tarsus – that’s the name of the man who’s been persecuting the
church – what
a co-incidence, Lord, because, obviously, it can’t be him, can it? –
can it?”
“Yes, Ananias – that’s the one…” Well,
would you go? What if it’s a trap? What if Ananias is bringing danger
not only
on himself, but on his friends too? How much courage did it take him to
walk
through those streets to the house where Saul was, knock on the door,
identify
himself as a follower of Jesus, and take Saul under his wing? Our human
self-protective instincts cry out, “Look behind you Ananias – that old
fox from
Tarsus is surely up to no good.”

But
Ananias goes anyway, and the rest is history. Saul of Tarsus, the
arch-enemy of
the church, becomes St Paul, the great missionary, who carries the
Christian
message all around the Mediterranean, a founding father of the church.
But it
is Ananias whose courage is celebrated in this story. Ananias doesn’t
know what
will happen. Even if Saul is genuine, perhaps his old associates are
nearby,
spying on him. But Ananias’ courage isn’t rooted in the conviction that
nothing
bad will happen to him – God doesn’t promise him that . All he knows is
that,
if disaster does fall, it won’t mean that God has deserted him. He has
seen
that God was with Jesus through the pain of the cross and the darkness
of death
into the new life of resurrection, and it will be the same for him. His
faith
and his peace don’t depend on his circumstances. The things that happen
to him
are just that, things that happen to him, not signs that God has given
or
withdrawn his love.

So
often we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that when good
things
happen it means we are good, favoured, worthwhile, and that when things
go
wrong we believe that we ourselves are a disaster area, fit only for
the scrapheap.
But the truth is – and Ananias knows it - that deep down we are the
same people
all the time, God’s children, endlessly beloved, always in his care
whatever
happens to us.

I
came across a very helpful way of thinking about this this week in
something I
read. Imagine you are standing on a mountain. If a blizzard is
blowing,
if it is swathed in fog, if the wind and rain are beating on you, you
are
probably going to think, “What a dreadful mountain – I’m never coming
here
again.” But if you are standing on that mountain in brilliant sunshine,
admiring the view and the exquisite alpine plants, basking in the
spring
sunshine, you will think it is the best place in the world. Actually,
it is the
same mountain – it is only the weather that has changed.

We
mistake the weather in our lives – the good and bad that comes and goes
- for
the mountain that is the real truth about us, that we are the dwelling
place of
God. There is a mountain at the heart of each of us, the solid fact of
our
status as God’s children. We might be blinded to that by the blizzards
and the
fog, but it is still there, the ground beneath our feet.

St
Peter learns this too in today’s Gospel reading. During Jesus’
ministry, when
he had been surrounded by adoring crowds, Peter felt on top of the
world. All
was well with him. But when Jesus was arrested and killed, surely this
meant
that the whole enterprise had been a mistake – where is God now? It is
only
when the risen Christ meets him that he realises that it is not the
acclaim of the
crowds nor the disgrace of the cross that really tell the true story –
either
about Jesus or about him. The truth doesn’t depend on passing
circumstances.
Peter is more than the sum of the things that happen to him – the
weather of
his life. He has within him a truth like a mountain – the love of God
which
nothing can destroy, not even death. It matters that he knows this,
because one
day he too will face death, and he will need to be sure of that
mountainous
truth. Jesus calls him Peter, from the Greek petros – the rock , a
mini-mountain – because he wants him to measure himself by his solid
centre –
God within him - not by the ever-changing weather of triumph and
trouble, joy
and sorrow that flows in and out of his life. And he wants the same for
us.

The
students of Virginia Tech have learned things this week that no one
would have
wanted them to learn. They have learned about the brokenness and
fragility of
the world, about death and loss and grief. One of them said, “For those
who
died this is all over, but for the rest of us it will go on for ever…”
And she
was right. But let us pray for them, and for all our young people, and
for all
the rest of us too, as we meet the vagaries of life. Let us pray that
we will
remember that whether the things that happen to us are good or bad,
they are
the weather that swirls around us, not the mountain at the heart of our
being
which is the truth of God’s love, and which lasts for ever. Amen

April 15th 2007 Easter 2 – "Breathing Space"
Communion

I
delivered this short "thought"
at the first of our new "Breathing Space" communion services on
Sunday evening. This new, contemplative communion service includes lots
of
silence, few words and just a little recorded music, as well as a
chance to
light candles. Despite it being "low Sunday" when congregations are
traditionally small, we were packed out in the Lady Chapel, running out
of
booklets and seats, which was a delightful surprise - "Breathing
Space" had been an attempt to re-think the evening communion
service
because numbers had dropped so low that it was hardly viable. If
numbers
continue at this level, we shall have to move back into the choir
stalls of the
main church (either that or the congregation will have to put their
names down
at birth for a seat at the service!)

“Peace
be with you, says Jesus to his disciples. In fact he says
it twice – and then again the following week when he comes again to see
Thomas.
“Peace be with you”. Perhaps it’s not surprising they need to hear it
again and
again. The last thing they have been feeling is peaceful. They are
terrified.
They have watched him crucified. They have justifiably feared that the
same
would happen to them. They also know that they have let him and
themselves down
– running off to hide rather than standing by him. They are afraid,
ashamed and
confused too. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. They desperately need
to hear
words of peace.

But
this greeting isn’t simply a reassuring comfort to them. “There, there
– it
will all be all right now. I’m back from death.”

The
peace that Jesus gives to his disciples in that locked room isn’t just
a
feel-good thing. Peace – shalom - in the Bible is the state in which
everything
is as it should be. Hurts are healed, relationships are repaired,
people thrive
and grow as God had always intended, as his children. Shalom means
wholeness,
not just the absence of noise or trouble. It is integrally tied up with
putting
right what is wrong, mending what is broken. That is what Jesus comes
to his
disciples to do. As they hear those words, once, twice, three times,
they begin
to take in that they are forgiven, that the disaster of their desertion
of
Jesus, the apparent failure of the cross, the terror they feel at being
left
abandoned to face the wrath of those who killed Jesus, isn’t the last
word.
Things can be set right, and there can be new birth, new life, and a
new
beginning for them.

But
the peace that Jesus gives them doesn’t end with them, as Jesus’ next
words
show. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy
Spirit. If
you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; If you retain the
sins of
any, they are retained.”

These
are words that are very familiar to anyone like me who has been
ordained as a
priest, because they are read at ordination services. One of the things
priests
are supposed to do, and are given authority to do by their ordination,
alongside blessing and celebrating communion, is to declare God’s
forgiveness
of sins. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; If you
retain
the sins of any, they are retained.”But
of course here Jesus isn’t speaking to a bunch of priests. He is
speaking to a
motley assortment of individuals – fishermen and tax collectors, people
he has
plucked from their ordinary lives, not necessarily learned in any
academic way,
not necessarily with any sort of qualifications for ministry. I can
understand
why the church came to insist that this was a priestly role. For many
it is
sometimes important to hear these words from someone they know the
church has
recognised and trained, and who is accountable. But there is a danger
if we get
to hung up on absolution as a priestly role that we miss the important
fact
that Jesus calls all of us to this ministry or forgiveness. The reality
is that
we do all have power, by what we say and do, to set others free, or to
imprison
them, tying them to their past actions so that neither they nor we can
move
forward. You don’t have to be a priest to help people know forgiveness,
or to
make them feel that there is no escape from what they have done. The
peace
which we find – that “shalom” wholeness” - is peace which we are called
also to
give, as we help others to mend, to heal, and to grow.

“Peace
be with you.” Not just a simple greeting. Not just soothing words. But
a
commitment from God to us, to let us be free from past sins and
failures, to
start again. And a calling from God to all of us – priests and
laypeople alike,
to recognise our power to set others free as well. Amen

Easter Sunday
07

That
first Easter day, the one we heard
about in the Gospel reading, was a day of great confusion. It started
badly. A
small group of women set out in the early morning, with a basket of
spices and
a vague plan of anointing a body, three days dead, sealed in a tomb
which they
had no way of getting into. But at least they had a plan, even if they
had no
idea how to put it into action. When they got to the tomb even that
little bit
of certainty evaporated. The stone was rolled away; the tomb was empty;
the
body was gone. In its place were angels with a mystifying message. A
message
which was met with disbelief and ridicule by the other disciples. What
on earth
was going on. What on earth was all this about?

We’ve
been celebrating Easter for a couple
of thousand years now, but my guess is that there are often times when
we feel
just as confused about it. What have we come here to celebrate? What
have we
come expecting? What is it all about for us, today?

Perhaps
it is easiest to start with what
it isn’t about.

Easter
isn’t about chocolate. Not that I
have anything against chocolate, you understand. If you’ve got more
Easter eggs
than you can manage, just send them along to the vicarage and I’ll be
quite
happy to polish them off for you. But Easter isn’t about chocolate. The
feasting isn’t an end in itself, or shouldn’t be.

Nor
is Easter about bunnies, or chicks, or
spring flowers – not that that I’ve got anything against them either.
They’re a
wonderful reminder of the resilience of life, a sign of joy and hope.
But they
can’t be an end in themselves any more than chocolate can.

Easter
isn’t – and you may be surprised to
hear me say this – Easter isn’t even primarily about the death and
resurrection
of Jesus. Of course, without that there would be nothing to celebrate.
But we
can easily get too hung up on arguing about the facts of an event that
happened
long ago – did Jesus literally rise from the dead? How could that be?
If not,
how did he rise? Every Easter the media seem to manage to produce some
story
challenging the resurrection, or some Bishop who says he doesn’t
believe in it.
But my experience is that most Christians aren’t followers of Christ
because of
an academic acceptance of something that happened two thousand years
ago. It is
what is happening in their own lives that matters to them. They may not
understand how Christ could rise from death, but somehow they have the
sense
that he is here, with them, very much alive and well. That’s what
matters, and
what makes the difference to them, that’s what convinces them. If
Easter is
just an ancient story, to be picked over, analysed and then forgotten
for
another year, we have missed the point completely.

So
if Easter isn’t primarily about any of
those things – the chocolate, the chicks, the old, old story -
what is it
about? It is about one word. If you get this one word, you have got
Easter,
you’ve got its essence, you’ve understood why it matters.

That
one word is “freedom”.

Jesus’
first followers understood this. It was no accident that
Jesus had been crucified at the time of the Passover feast – when the
Jewish
people celebrated God rescuing them from slavery in Egypt. Every
Passover the
story was told again; the story of Moses; of their dramatic escape
across the
Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army hard on their heels, and the journey to
freedom in
the Promised Land. The Passover was a feast of freedom.

But
by the time of Christ, although the
old story was still told, in reality many people were just as enslaved
as they
had ever been in Egypt. They were enslaved by the occupying Roman army,
not
daring to challenge their might, terrorised into compliance by the
threat of
death. They were enslaved too by the religious authorities. The laws
which had
been God’s great gift to them had become ways of controlling and
oppressing people, sorting out the sinners, keeping at a distance
those
whose behaviour or lifestyle was considered to be beyond the pale. The
poor,
the sick, women and children, those who had infringed the complex laws
of
purity – they were pushed to the margins.

Against
this backdrop, the ministry of
Jesus came as a great cry of liberation. He went deliberately to those
who had
been pushed aside. He angered the authorities by saying that they were
worth
just as much to God as the rich, the powerful and the good. It was
dangerous
stuff – a message of freedom to people who were chained down by the
attitudes
of those around them. No wonder those same enslaving authorities had
him
killed.

And
having killed him, they thought that
was that. It was all over. But that first, confusing, Easter morning
showed
them that they were wrong. It was God who was going to have the last
word here.
And that last word was freedom. Freedom for Jesus from the grave.
Freedom for
those who followed him from the suffocating constrictions of the
religious laws
and the attitudes of their society. Freedom from the fear of
death.

Freedom
is at the heart of the Easter
message. And I suppose I could, at this point, sit down and shut up.
Isn’t that
enough?

Well,
sorry, no it isn’t, because freedom,
in reality, is never as simple as it appears.

We’ve
heard a lot about freedom just recently as we’ve marked
the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Perhaps we
thought
we knew what we were going to hear as we re-visited this story. But in
fact
there have been challenges and surprises for many of us as we have
re-examined
the history. It isn’t a story of one great hero, William Wilberforce,
single-handedly defeating oppression, like an eighteenth century Moses,
for a
start. We’ve heard about the wide range of people who campaigned for
freedom.
Many of those were black slaves, or ex-slaves themselves. There were
many
unsung black champions, and the slaves themselves were vital to the
fight. They
weren’t the passive victims that they’ve often been portrayed as.

Just
as we’ve had to broaden our view of
those who fought against slavery, we’ve also had to broaden our view of
those
who wanted to keep it. It’s no good us thinking it was just the slave
traders
who profited. There were many people with a vested interest in slavery.
It
created the prosperity we still enjoy as a nation. All our major
institutions –
including the Church – are tainted by it. And the African nations from
which
the slaves came were complicit too – selling people as slaves was
commonplace.

It
wasn’t the case, either that once the
slave trade ended, or once slavery itself became illegal, all was well.
Slave
owners were compensated, but ex-slaves were left to fend for
themselves.
Slavery has left a long legacy of racism and poverty which still
bedevils our
world. And of course modern day anti-slavery campaigners remind us that
slavery
is still thriving in the form of debt bondage and human trafficking.

No
wonder this issue is still so
contentious. No wonder we are still arguing about who should apologise
to whom,
and for what, whether and how reparation should be made, to whom and by
whom.
Gaining freedom is one thing. Living it is another.

Slavery
is complex. Freedom is complex
too. It isn’t won in one triumphal swoop. It isn’t all done and dusted
in a
day. Whether it is freedom from slavery in a Caribbean plantation, or
freedom
for modern day slaves, or freedom from slavery to fear, or freedom from
slavery
to other people’s expectations and prejudices it is something you have
to live
constantly. It is a journey, made one step at a time. Freedom is hard
to find,
and even harder to stick to.

What
is Easter about? It is a great call
to freedom. It starts with that empty tomb, with Jesus bursting from
the
imprisonment of death to the freedom of resurrection, but it doesn’t
end there.
Christians sometimes call themselves “Easter people”, but that doesn’t
mean
that we should go around with a lazy assumption that once we have found
Christ
all is well, that some magic wand has been waved over our lives and our
world.
“Christ is risen, Alleluia!” but are we risen? Is our world risen, set
free, as
Christ wants it to be?

Being
Easter people means committing
ourselves to a long and difficult road – the road to freedom - working
to
confront oppression in our own age, not just rejoicing in its defeat in
the
past. It means learning to see the way in which we are enslaved
ourselves –
enslaved to the opinions of others, enslaved to the fear of standing up
and
being counted, enslaved to behaviour which we know is harmful, enslaved
to sin
in all its forms. It means learning to see the ways in which we enslave
others
too – forcing them to be like us, to meet our needs, no matter what the
cost to
them.

There
IS a great shout of victory today, and great rejoicing,
and feasting. The signs of spring are all around us, pointing us to the
new
life God wants for his people. But today is just the start, not the
end. Easter
people are people on a journey, not people who have arrived smugly at
their
destination. God’s call to us is not just to CELEBRATE Easter, but to
LIVE it
as we learn together to be truly free.

Amen.

Maundy Thursday 07

I have a
wonderful photo
that I treasure of my two children when they were small. Michael was
about 4
and Ruth about 2. We had set out for a walk up the hill to the local
duck pond.
On the way hunger struck. But there was no food. Or was there? Before I
was
really aware of what was happening Michael had produced the bag of
bread he had
been carrying to feed the ducks, and was busy sharing it with his
little
sister. (I don’t think it can have been too stale!) Whether there was
any left
for the ducks I can’t remember, but I love the picture we managed to
get of
this magic moment. It reassures me that despite all the quarrels I
remember
between my two when they were growing up basically they cared about
each other
(and still do twenty years later). Even if it was only duck food, he
wasn’t
going to let her starve!

This
picture
is, quite literally, a picture of companionship. The word companion
comes from two Latin words – com­ meaning with and
panis,
meaning bread. A companion is someone you share your
bread with –
just as Michael is doing here. Giving what is yours to someone else –
food you
might need or want for yourself – says that they matter to you.
You want
to see them survive, at the most basic level, and grow and thrive too.
Often we
will do far more than this – putting ourselves out to cook a meal to
share with
friends. Biologists will tell us that we are genetically programmed to
help
sustain our families, but human companionship isn’t limited by this –
in fact
it can even extend to people we don’t know at all.

I’ve
been
really touched by the reaction to the appeal I passed on last week from
the
Bridge Trust, which works with the young homeless. They were
specifically
asking for money to support a young girl they called Hannah, who
was in
danger of having to give up her BTEC course because there was no more
money to
house her. I’ve been able to send almost £300 and I’m quite sure
that other
churches and individuals will have responded in the same way. I was
touched,
but not at all surprised, by the swift and generous response I had, and
I’m
quite confident that the Bridge Trust will soon have the money Hannah
needs.
But I know from what people said to me, and from what I felt myself,
that it
wasn’t just the money that people wanted to send. They also wanted,
through
that act of sharing, to send Hannah a message, to tell her that she had
friends. Even though we might never meet her we wanted her to know we
cared. We
shared our “bread” with her, and though she was completely unknown to
us,
because of that, we have made her our companion.

Tonight
we
celebrate another act of companionship – sharing of bread - as we give
thanks
for the gift of the Eucharist. We celebrate Christ’s act of breaking
and
sharing bread at the Last Supper – something which he said was so
important
that every time we broke and shared bread in the future he would
somehow be
present with us in it. Christians have argued about how, precisely,
that might
be so. Does the bread and wine literally change in some way? Is it a
memorial
of something that happened long ago? There has been any amount of
erudite (and
often bitter) theological debate about what it is that happens when we
“do this
in remembrance of him”, but actually I’m not too sure it matters. What
is
important is that we grasp what all this has to do with companionship,
how this
act of sharing bread creates and proclaims our connection to one
another and to
God.

Sharing
bread with others
makes them our companions. Through it we are linked together. It says
that they
matter. We are prepared to give up what we might have hoarded for
ourselves for
their sake. The bread and wine we share in the Eucharist declares to us
that
the same is true – and even more true – of God’s relationship with us.
He has
given us his own Son, given him completely, body, blood, life on the
cross for
our sake. Has given and continues to give to us his owns self. Why?
Because we
matter to him, whoever we are, whatever our background or life story.

In the
Eucharist God makes
companions of us – companions to himself, companions to one another.

It
all
sounds wonderful, and it is wonderful, but before we get all carried
away into
a misty warm haze here, I want to sound a warning note. It is no
accident that
we celebrate the institution of the Eucharist on this day, this night,
on
Maundy Thursday. It is no accident that it was at this meal that Jesus
chose to
take what was a perfectly ordinary act, the act of blessing, breaking
and
sharing bread and wine – something that happened at every Jewish meal –
and
give it this new meaning, forging through it a new companionship.

What is it
about this night?
It is “the night when he was betrayed.” Jesus blesses, breaks and
shares this
meal, declaring his companionship with his followers, the sharing of
his life
with them, knowing full well that one of them is about to sell him to
his
enemies, that another will deny knowing him before the night is out,
that the
rest will scatter into the darkness when the soldiers come rather than
share
his fate.

The
companionship that Jesus declares is not rooted in sentimentality or
wishful
thinking. It is not a game of happy Christian families, a fantasy world
in
which we can pretend everyone is nice to each other, seeing eye to eye,
never
failing or hurting one another.

There are often times
when this
Eucharistic meal is – or at least should be - a hard one to swallow.
Perhaps we
are aware that our life is not as it ought to be. Perhaps we are aware
of those
whom we have betrayed or failed. Perhaps we know there are quarrels and
resentments which seem impossible to sort out. Perhaps we are simply,
painfully, aware of the brokenness of the church, where differences of
opinions
so often harden into suspicion, hatred and rejection. As a woman priest
I know
what it is like to have people refuse to take the bread from me when I
have
celebrated the Eucharist. Sometimes I’ve found it hard myself to take
communion
from a priest who I know feels that way about me.

The
Eucharist
is a great gift, but it is not always a comforting or an easy meal. On
the
whole most of us would not choose to invite our enemies or those who
have hurt
us to dinner. It is hard enough having to face them in other
situations, we
certainly don’t want to be confronted with them over the best china,
and have
to make polite conversation. I don’t know whether Ian Paisley and Gerry
Adams
ate together when they met a week or so ago. It seemed to be hard
enough for
them even to sit in the same room, and a real achievement to have done
so. I
rather doubt whether a cosy dinner a deux featured on the programme.
That is a
long way further down the road from where they are now.

But the
Eucharist is not a
dinner party for friends, a club for like minded people. It isn’t a
badge of
merit for those who deserve it. It isn’t an exercise in private
sentimental
piety. It is instead a radical statement of our belief that ultimately,
beyond
and beneath our divisions, there is a unity to which God is inexorably
drawing
us, that God’s desire is to bring together, to make companions, of
everything
in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Jesus chooses this meal,
surrounded
by those who will desert and betray him, because he wants us to know
that true
companionship is rooted in the reality of our relationships with one
another
and with God, not in some fantasy world. True companionship doesn’t
rely on us
getting it right all the time. It is strong enough, deep enough, wide
enough to
encompass not only our successes but also our failures. It endures, no
matter
what we do to try to destroy it.

“Do this
in remembrance of
me” says Jesus. Share your bread – the stuff of your lives, the reality
of your
existence, what is most precious and life giving. Share your bread,
even if it
is hard, even if you fail. As we “do this in remembrance of him”, as we
do this
as he did it, with the real gift of his real life, God is present,
however we
understand it, reaching across the barriers we have created, to come to
us with
life that will never end and food that will never be exhausted.

Amen

Palm
Sunday Evensong 07

Isaiah
5.1-7, Luke 20.9-19

Imagine
yourself in a crowded marketplace
in the Middle East, in the times of the Bible. In an age before radio,
television and films, the marketplace was where you found not only
food, but
also entertainment. So here you are amidst exotic sights and smells,
greeting
neighbours and gawping at visitors from distant lands. In the melee you
hear a
voice raised in song, and a knot of people gathered. It is the ballad
singer,
the storyteller, come to the market to sell HIS wares – crowd-pleasing
sagas,
stories of heroes, and, of course, romantic tales. The song he begins
now is
one of these. “Let me sing a song for my beloved…” he starts. We know
what to
expect.

This
is the world that Isaiah is evoking
in the first reading, and his hearers would have been very familiar
with the
scene. They would have known what to expect just as we do. But Isaiah’s
love
song takes a completely different and shocking turn. Instead of hearts
and
flowers and a happy ending this turns out to be a strange tale about a
vineyard; a vineyard which, despite the owner’s labours – clearing the
weeds,
building watchtowers and planting it with the best vines - produces
nothing but
sour, tiny, wild grapes – no good for anything.

It
is a mysterious reading. We might
wonder whether two separate passages have been spliced together
accidentally.
What has love got to do with vineyards? But I think there’s a good
reason why
Isaiah mixes up these two images – the love song and the agricultural
parable.

Of
course, those who heard Isaiah’s
prophecy would have known what he was talking about. The vineyard was
Israel -
both the land and the people. God had chosen them as the place where he
would
make himself known, and where he would begin his work of setting right
the
world. That’s why Isaiah starts his story as if it is a love-song,
because he
knew that God’s relationship with his people was not a functional one,
not a
matter of how much they produced in the way of good works, but a
relationship
of love. This vineyard owner tends his vineyard lovingly; he puts
himself out
for it. No expense is spared. In the same way, God had laboured
lovingly for
Israel, rescuing his people from slavery, leading them to freedom,
founding
them in their own territory, sticking with them through thick and thin,
through
multiple betrayals. And yet still Israel didn’t learn. Instead of the
rich
harvest of justice – love and peace which should have overflowed to
neighbouring nations so that the light of God could spread through the
whole
world – there was bloodshed. Instead of seeing Israel as a beacon of
hope, a
place where wrongs were righted, there were cries of terror and despair
as the
rich oppressed the poor. Some love story this turned out to be!

Isaiah’s
God is not some unreasonable,
callous judge, arbitrarily condemning people to suffering because they
don’t
produce what he hopes; he is a patient and passionate lover, who longs
to be
with his people and to see them prosper simply because he cares about
them. He
loves them, and it pains him deeply that his love seems to make no
difference
to them. By setting this up as a love story, and reminding his hearers
of what
they would expect to hear in the market place, the happy ever after
story,
Isaiah makes all the more shocking the eventual end, which is one in
which the
vineyard is destroyed by invaders, trampled down and left to the thorns
and the
thistles. Love, he suggests, can make no difference unless people let
it take
root in them. Just as an abused lover eventually runs out of new
tactics to try
to get their abusive partner to change, and is wise to leave them, so
Isaiah
expects that God must now have run out of tactics to use with Israel.

It
is a hard reading, one that must make us uncomfortable, but
it is one which confronts us starkly with our own power and
responsibility.

We
too are called to live lives that produce harvests of
righteousness for the world, letting God work in us to transform our
sour
“wild-grape” lives into rich wine. But God can’t compel us to change,
not
without denying us the free-will that was his original gift to us. And
if we
don’t produce righteousness, if we don’t produce justice and peace, the
consequence for us and our world is just the same as it was for Israel
–
bloodshed and tears, war and famine and environmental degradation. We
don’t
have to see it as a punishment meted out by an angry God, as Isaiah
does; it is
simply the natural result of our acts of greed and possessiveness. The
messes
that confront us in the world start in the human heart and in our
relationships
with one another and with God. Either we let God change us, healing the
wounds
that give rise to sin, or we carry on as we are, producing sour gifts
of strife
and sadness. It’s up to us.

The
image of the people of God as a
vineyard probably wasn’t new even in Isaiah’s day, but by the time of
Jesus it
was firmly established in the common imagination. So when Jesus tells
HIS
story, he knew people would get the picture straight away.

Here
is another vineyard, owned by a man
who has leased it to tenants and gone on a journey. When he sends for
the share
of the produce – the rent they owe him - he discovers, that they have
taken
possession of it. They send his slave back empty-handed – not even with
a
message for the owner. He is irrelevant to their lives. The next slave
he sends
is beaten up, and a third also.

So
he sends his son. That tells a tale in itself. Who would risk
their son, when they have already seen how the tenants treat slaves?

But
the tenants don’t understand that. They treat the whole
business as if it is just that – a business, and with an absentee
landlord to
boot. Perhaps they think he won’t notice their theft, their murder?
Perhaps
they think he doesn’t care – about the land, about them, even about his
son
himself? Easy come, easy go.

But
they are wrong. This story, like Isaiah’s, isn’t just about
agricultural economics. It’s a love story too, of a father for his son,
whose
inheritance this land was to be. In trying to steal this land they have
wounded
not just the father’s bank balance but his very heart. “What will the
owner do
then?” Jesus asks. “How would you expect him to react?” To his hearers
it must
have been obvious. You can’t kill someone’s beloved son without
expecting swift
retribution. How could the father behave as if nothing had happened?

Once
again, then, this turns out to be a
love song – and one that ends in tears for all concerned.

Today
is the beginning of Holy Week. During this coming week,
day by day, we’ll be reading and praying our way through the story of
the last
week of Jesus’ earthly life, a story which seems to echo this parable,
and
Isaiah’s prophecy. We’ll hear about plotting, betrayal, arrest, torture
and
death. It is a grim story, but just like the stories of these two
vineyards,
the events of Holy week are a love song too. Jesus’ love song for us.
They are
the culmination of a life lived for love, a life of passionate
commitment to
establishing the kingdom of God on earth, risking everything to reach
those who
had been excluded from that kingdom – the poor, the outsiders, the
sick. This
love for us and our poor battered world was so strong it was prepared
to pay an
unimaginably high price. And just as in those other two love songs the
lover is
rejected, treated as nothing. Easy come, easy go. What do we need with
a
saviour?

But
the similarity between these
earlier tales and the real-life story of Jesus’ death ends there, and
it is the
difference between them which we are really meant to notice.

Isaiah
told a love story which ended in
the tragedy of abandonment. Jesus, in his parable, told a love story
that ended
in the expectation of violent retribution. Both stories remind us of
the passionate
nature of love – but it is a passion that ends in disaster. The good
news of
the story that we will be hearing in this coming week – the story told
in the
flesh and blood of Jesus – is that it doesn’t have to end like that.
Humanity
does the worst it can to God, and human logic expects that he will cast
us off,
but that isn’t what happens. There is – there always can be –
forgiveness and a
new beginning, the real-life story says; not because God doesn’t
care
what we do – there is no “easy come, easy go” about his relationship
with us –
but because he cares SO passionately that he can never finally let us
go. The
love song we’ll be hearing, the love story we’ll be telling, goes
beyond all
human sense or logic. Human love has human limits, but God’s love has
no
limits. He calls to us, like the singer in the market place to listen
not to
our fears, but to his love that is stronger than death, and to let that
love
song change us forever.

Did you check yourself in front of the mirror before you left home this
morning? Possibly you had forgotten about the clocks going forward an
hour and
had to rush, letting your normally high standards slip a little.
Are
appearances important?

Good Christian people know that it’s what’s in you heart that matters
isn’t it?
Yet there’s a full length mirror on the wall behind the vestry door you
know, I
hasten to add that it was there long before this church appointed its
first
lady priest. I looked in it today before I came out to ensure my scarf
was
even.

I think the truth is that we do care how others see us. It’s installed
in us
from a young age that it’s good to look clean and tidy, we think others
expect
it. But our appearance can also say a lot about us.

I’ve owned a Barbour coat since I was in my teens and when I was a part
time
soldier I was told not to wear it, I was a mere NCO, and only
commissioned
officers were to wear these coats to avoid confusion! The same coat
seems to
find favour with Royalty and after Helen Mirren wore one in her recent
film
about the Queen sales in America went through the roof.

Then there are cultural and racial appearances, people who have
different skin
colour, dress differently or believe different things from us. If these
things
make us feel uncomfortable should we seek to dominate these people so
that our
ways prevail?

As we remember 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade this
weekend we
are reminded how people are dehumanised to suit their exploiters. It’s
actually
so important that we do remember how wrong this was as entire peoples
have been
enslaved, exploited and ill treated from the Nazi regime to Saddam
Hussein to
Robert Mugabe just to name a few. By looking back and seeking Christ’s
healing
and forgiveness in these situations we must try to carry this forward
into our
future. We need to think why some foods or clothes are so cheap for us,
why
people are being trafficked between countries and think what we can do
to
support social and economic justice.

What we look like, the brand of car we drive, the labels on the clothes
we
wear, the newspaper we read, the schools we attended the people we are
seen
with, all these things say who we are. Or do they? These are narrow
confines
related to marketing, brand awareness, class distinction, demographics,
socio-economic profiling and inaccurate preconceptions.

Do Christians subscribe to this? Well I suspect the answer is yes and
no. Yes
we like many of the materialistic things that others do, but no we are
not
prepared to be pigeon holed by them. We will not conform to many
stereotypes
but will revel in surprising others by stepping outside these because
our
values extend so far beyond them.

When Paul talks of confidence in the flesh he is referring to all the
privileges in life being the only things we aspire to and value. He
talks of
many good reasons why he could justify being part of this system of
values as
he tells of his family, religion and status, all of which would have
him highly
regarded in Jewish Society. Yet what so many see as signs of success
and
privilege he talks of as negatives once he came to know the values of
Christ.
These seemingly positive things threatened to get between him and
Christ,
something each of us would be wise to consider.

There is a difference between working hard and working to excess
because the
potential wealth generated is all that matters. I can remember seeing a
sketch
with two middle aged men living in huge houses with ride on lawn mowers
and
sports cars galore constantly trying to out do each other. As one man
rides on
his mower he shouts out to his neighbour ‘whoever dies with the most
toys
wins’.

It is one thing to become obsessed with our acquisitions yet quite
another to
recklessly waste valuable commodities when they are in short supply.

We see Mary taking expensive perfume and anointing Jesus feet with it.
Unquestionably she acted with great extravagance; the perfume
represented all
she had of value, probably costing around one year’s salary for a
worker.

Yet Jesus defends her actions when she is criticised by Judas
explicitly
stating that this is a burial anointing, implying that Mary understands
what is
to happen to him, and that this is a prophetic act. Real love is
expressed
through her actions; you can almost smell the perfume which filled the
house
and feel the softness of Mary’s hair as she tenderly wipes his feet.

It’s good to be reminded of tenderness and generosity when it seems
that so
many groups, cultures or nations are hell bent on their way prevailing.
We need
to get in touch with our common humanity and start caring more about
each other
regardless of our differences. There is an urgent need for us to look
beyond
our differences to, a recognition of the overriding oneness of our
human
family, and our obligations to it.

Even though Paul talks of straining forward towards the prize which is
Christ,
like an athlete hoping to win a photo finish I was reminded this week
that
there is also a time to simply revel and bask in Gods grace and his
love for
us. Lent is passing quickly by and I was feeling bad that I hadn’t read
a book,
been on a course or given God some other practical way he could see I
had taken
lent seriously.

Accepting that I hadn’t made time recently to just be me and accept
God’s love
has helped me relax a little and just enjoy God in the good things
which seem a
little sharper. I certainly recommend it to you.

As we become more confident that God takes each one of us very
seriously it
becomes easier to take ourselves a little less seriously. Safe in God’s
care
his gift of humour feels like something worth spreading.

I read of a man in Auschwitz. And he knew that if, even once he
despaired, he'd
lose the will to live. So he and a friend made an agreement. Every day
they'd
look for and find something in the middle of that nightmare that they
could
laugh about. And they did. How, I don't know. But 60 years later he
told how
that humour saved his life. And he was being absolutely serious.
There can be something spiritual about humour; it can reflect what is
at our
core. I think it's the fact that if we can laugh at something, we can't
be
intimidated by it. It's our refusal to be defined by today an
understanding
that events need to be considered in the perspective which is Gods
time.
Lionel Blue is someone who, as a gay Rabbi, knows what it is like to be
excluded by people uncomfortable with the way in which he is different
from
them. As an ageing man living in an area of London where his neighbours
come
form many backgrounds he says’ In this communal mix I feel proud of my
own lot,
the mature Jewish women who help staff the charity shops and give
immigrants,
locals and street people the attention you might expect in Bond Street.
What
would appall many they take in their stride confident in their calling
to
serve. They learnt about old clothes as youngsters in the shmatte trade
and
their factory humour spices our suburban respectability.’
He tells how a flasher accosts an old Jewish woman on her way home from
her
workshop and excitedly throws open his overcoat. She goes up to him and
peers
closely. 'You call that a lining?' she says to the bewildered man who’s
suddenly more interested in where his coat came from.
And a little humour can bring some humanity into the most dire
situations. Take
the Lebanese, in a country that has repeatedly been invaded by Israel,
the one
joke everyone likes to tell remains:

An Israeli arrives at London's Heathrow airport. As he fills out a
form, the
customs officer asks him: "Occupation?"

To which he defensively replies: "No, No, just visiting!"
My suggestion for the week ahead is be prepared to let go of old things
that
may weigh heavily. Take the week off, a week off feeling you must be
doing
something and remind yourself how much you are loved by God, bask in it
and
enjoy it like warm sunshine or a hot bath. If we can do this we may
even find
we have the confidence to take ourselves a little less seriously.
You do realise that if this caught on it could even lead to a more
peaceful
future for us all and that would certainly be something worth smiling
about.

A couple of weeks ago the Sunday School were working on the famous
story we’ve
heard in today’s Gospel reading. When they came back to join the rest
of us
they brought up the drawings they had made of the different parts of
the story.
I thought it would be fun to see whether the congregation, who couldn’t
see the
pictures clearly, could guess what the story was. “What is the story
about,” I
asked, “who is in it?”
“A boy”, one of them answered.
“And who else?”
“Another boy”, they added helpfully.
“And?” I asked.
“A dad”
“And anything else?”
“A pig!” they said triumphantly.
And that was it.
A boy, another boy, a dad and a pig.

It was an economical version of the tale, but you couldn’t fault it for
accuracy, and actually they probably told us most of what we needed to
know to
guess how this story would unfold.

A story about a boy and another boy? It is bound to end up in a
squabble.
Siblings, whatever their gender, seem to have no trouble finding
something to
fall out about. It happens in the best regulated families. They
squabble
because they are alike. They squabble because they are different. They
squabble
for no reason at all sometimes – it is just built in. They may be the
best of
friends one minute, thick as thieves, but the next moment they are
rolling on
the floor apparently trying to murder each other.

And then there is the dad. Who’d be a dad? Who’d be a mum either, come
to
that? It would be really useful if antenatal classes included
training
for the Secretary Generalship of the United Nations, because finding
solutions
to sibling squabbles is often just as difficult. Usually the best you
can hope
for is that they will end up united against you, instead of fighting
each
other. You love them both, so why can’t they love each other?

And the pig? Well that is a sure sign that someone somewhere in this
story is
going to end up in a mess.

A boy, another boy, a dad and a pig. On the face of it a simple story.
A story
about families just like our own, people just like us.
But its simplicity is a bit deceptive, because actually it is a story
which
changes, grows and deepens the more you look at it. It is a story with
a lot of
room in it – room for us to identify with it and learn from it.

We can take it, for example, on an individual level, identifying
ourselves with
its characters and seeing echoes of our personal or family lives in it.
Some
people will feel like the younger son, the prodigal. Perhaps they’ve
taken a
wrong turn in their lives, done things they regret, and they have
needed to
discover that there can be forgiveness and a new start. They’ve been
overjoyed
to find that God’s love for them is not grudging or measured, but
overflowing,
like the love of this father for his repentant son.
Others might see themselves in the older son. The sensible one. The
responsible
one. That’s the story of their lives. Instead of squandering their
inheritance
on loose living, they have squandered it on tight living. They have
worked hard
to do what they think is right, but only because they fear that God
wouldn’t
love them otherwise – for who they are rather than for what they do.
There may be some too, who identify with the father. They are waiting
and
hoping for a child to come home, for something to change.

As well as our personal circumstances this story can also help us to
reflect on
wider issues, though. The scribes and the Pharisees to whom Jesus first
told
this story believed that they were God’s faithful servants. They were
the older
brother. They disapproved of those who didn’t live according to the
law, who
were destined for destruction, not deserving God’s love. Jesus
challenges their
judgementalism. Not only are they cutting others off from God’s love,
they
aren’t really living in its fullness themselves either. The tragedy is
that God
loves them more than they will ever realise, but they are so
pre-occupied in
anxiously policing what they think are the boundaries of his kingdom
that they
can’t see it.

This judgementalism is still rife, of course – not just in religious
groups but
in any groups. Groups tend to want to organise themselves – to sort out
the
insiders from the outsiders, to regulate their membership, to set
conditions
for joining. Once we see ourselves as the guardians of an inheritance,
as this
older brother does, it is very hard for us to relax about letting
others share
in it – what if they don’t take the same care we do? We’ve put in the
hard
labour, they’ve just shown up at the last minute. This sort of
resentment can be
expressed towards newcomers to church who have the effrontery to
express ideas
about how we might do things differently, or towards people whose
lifestyles
don’t fit our mould of acceptability, or towards people who only come
to church
now and then for weddings and baptisms – they are just using us, we
think! But
in God’s eyes, this story says, they are just as precious. He rejoices
because
they are there, seeing what IS rather than what we think ought to be.

So we can look at this story from a personal angle, or from a wider
angle,
seeing its challenge to our judgementalism and exclusivity.

But there is one more facet to this story, which seems to me to be
particularly
intriguing and important as we approach Holy Week and Easter. As I have
said,
we can identify with it as individuals, or as groups – looking for
ourselves in
it. But where is Jesus in it?

Where is Jesus in this story? To be honest it had never really occurred
to me
to look for him in it– there was quite enough going on without worrying
about
that. But then I spotted something that seemed too much of a
coincidence to be
accidental, and I realized that he was there actually. He has stepped
inside
this story, just as we do. It was the little phrase that the father
uses of his
prodigal son when he returns which gives the game away. He uses it
twice in
fact. Once to the servants as he gives his instructions for the feast
they are
to prepare, and once to the older brother. “This son of mine was dead
and is
alive again”. “This brother of yours was dead and has come to
life.”
Suddenly a bell started ringing in my head. Who else is dead and comes
to life
in the Gospel? It is Jesus himself. I can’t believe this is just an
accidental
turn of phrase. Luke is too careful a writer for that.

And when you look at the preface to the story you see another parallel.
What is
it that the Pharisees are complaining about? That Jesus eats with
sinners. Just
like the prodigal in fact, who has “devoured his father’s property with
prostitutes.” Now, I’m not suggesting that this means that Jesus IS the
prodigal or that he behaved in a dissolute manner. What I think he is
doing
here is playing into the worst suspicions of the religious authorities
ABOUT
him. He wasn’t a sinner in reality, but these people who challenged him
thought
he was. And they disapproved of him thoroughly for it. He associated
with
sinners – tax-collectors, prostitutes, the lowest of the low – even
eating with
them, which was strictly forbidden. By doing that he made himself as
unclean as
they were.

It wasn’t just this that offended them, though. They could see that he
was a
brilliant teacher, someone who knew the scriptures, someone to whom
others
looked for teaching. He seemed to have received a great inheritance
from God.
But instead of using his power and wisdom to reinforce the status quo,
he is
squandering his inheritance on people who don’t deserve it. He might as
well go
and feed pigs – unclean animals that make unclean any who associate
with them.
What a waste! What a disgrace!

Just as those “older brother” Pharisees would have thought that this
story
ought to end with the prodigal dying forgotten in that filthy pig sty,
so they
believe that Jesus’ story should and will end with his destruction –
crucified
on the midden of Calvary with outcast unclean criminals for company. It
is only
just, only fair that it should be so.

But it was not so. What Luke tells us is that instead of disappearing
without a
trace, the filthy, despised son in fact gets a new robe – the best one
– a ring
on his finger, sandals for his feet, and a feast to welcome him home.
And this
is how it was for Jesus also. The tomb couldn’t hold him. The disgrace
of the
cross was not the last word.

St Paul writes to the Corinthians that God “made Christ to be sin who
knew no
sin”. We think of him, with 2000 years of hindsight as a man in whom
everyone
must really have seen goodness, but in fact, to those who attacked him
he was
as wicked as this prodigal – taking the riches of faith and casting
them down
before those who had forfeited their right to them. His death on a
cross was
assumed by many to be a sign of his disgrace and of God’s rejection.
But just
like the prodigal in the story, Christ, who was dead, returned to life
again.
He had gone out into a distant land too– beyond the pale of respectable
society. There he got alongside the most lost and sinful. In the eyes
of those
who held the power, by doing this he was lost, a sinner, also. And
having got
alongside them, he stayed alongside them in the messes they endured,
sharing
and suffering that mess with them, just as he is beside those today who
sit in
the muck of life. And he is beside them still when they make the long
trek back
home, knowing full well that they will be greeted joyfully by their
Father who
loves them with a love which is beyond measure and beyond reason, and
who will
run down the road to meet them with undignified and unconstrained
delight.

It is a simple story. A story of a boy, another boy, a dad and a pig –
but in
it lies the whole great truth of salvation, thestory
of the love of Christ who became sin for us, so
that we could come home with him and find our Father’s welcome.
Amen

“Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.”
I’m sure all the Sound of Music fans in the congregation recognised
that
instantly. Maria’s life has taken an unexpected turn. Baron Von Trapp
has proposed
to her and she is over the moon with happiness. Why has this happened?
Because,
she believes “Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done
something
good.”

The belief that we get what we deserve, and that we deserve what we get
is very
widespread. Of course sometimes there is some sense in it. If you love
others,
some of them will probably love you back. If you chain-smoke and drink
yourself
under the table every night it won’t be too surprising if you get lung
disease
or cirrhosis of the liver. But we can sometimes get it badly wrong when
we try
to make a link between people’s behaviour and the things that happen to
them. I
expect we all know good people to whom terrible things have happened,
and times
when great evil seems to have gone completely unpunished. I’ve often
heard
people agonise when things go wrong in their lives – “What did I do to
deserve
this?” they cry. If they can’t think of anything to blame themselves
for they
blame God. He hasn’t obeyed what they think are his own rules – he’s
allowed
them to suffer when they’ve done nothing to deserve it?

Jesus meets a group of people in today’s Gospel reading who believe
that you
get what you deserve and you deserve what you get. There have been two
high
profile disasters locally. There has been a massacre in the Temple at
Jerusalem, and there has also been a terrible accident. A tower has
collapsed
at Siloam, killing eighteen people. Why? Had the victims sinned
in some
way? “Somewhere in their youth and childhood” had they done something
bad? The
crowd expect Jesus to answer “yes”. Then as now, this belief was
widespread.
Its roots ran deep, like a pernicious weed. Health, wealth and security
were
signs of God’s blessing; disease and disaster a sign of his anger. Even
St
Paul, in our second reading seems to succumb to this sort of logic – it
is a
less than inspiring reading. But Jesus won’t go along with this
thinking. Did
these people deserve their fate? Did they have it coming to them? No,
he says,
they didn’t, they were no worse than any of us.

This tendency to believe that there must be some hidden link between
sin and
disaster, virtue and success probably comes from our human desire to
understand
the world, to make connections and figure things out. We want to find
predictable patterns so that we know what is coming and can prepare for
it.
Maybe we can even control it. That’s fine when we get it right, but
sometimes
our need to predict and control leads us to see links where there
aren’t any.
We fall into superstitious behaviour. A footballer insists on
wearing his
lucky socks – the ones he wore when he scored that winning goal – every
time he
goes out onto the pitch. He’s linked two things together – the socks
and the
winning - but there really is no link. Conspiracy theorists spin webs
of
connections between unrelated events, convinced that there is a secret
plot to
be discovered. So long as we have a neat answer, an answer that works
for us,
it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. It makes our world feel
safer, more
predictable and manageable. It makes us feel as if we are in control.

This sort of superstitious attitude can easily creep into religion too.
If only
we can find the right buttons to push, say the right prayers, work out
what
makes God cross and avoid doing it we can keep him on our side, make
him do
what we want, get health, wealth and success in this life and a ticket
to
heaven when we die. There are Christians who sincerely believe that God
sent
Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for what they consider its
moral
laxity. It sounds simple, and they believe it is simple, and it gives
them a
comforting sense of safety, because they do not behave like those they
are
condemning. But their analysis doesn’t really hold water at all.
Disasters
don’t discriminate. Good people often die in them: bad people often
survive.

So where does that leave us? Does it not matter what we do, how we
live? Is
that what Jesus is saying? No, not at all. In fact he warns his hearers
that
unless they repent they will perish just as these others have
done.
Bearing in mind that he has just said their deaths weren’t a punishment
on
them, this sounds like a bit of a mixed message, and it isn’t easy to
make
sense of what he means, but I’ll have a go. Here’s a suggestion.

The word “repent” literally means “to change your mind”. “Change your
mind”
says Jesus, or you will die just as they did. How did they die? They
died
believing that it was their fault. They died believing that they were
being
punished, that they had got it wrong and that God didn’t love them.
“Change
your mind” says Jesus. “Change your mind about God and about what he is
up to
in your lives. Change your mind about the way he works, how he feels
about
you”, or you will die believing the same thing, and what a tragedy that
would
be.

To ram the point home he tells them a story. It is a story about a man
who owns
a fig tree that won’t bear fruit. Cut it down! , the man tells his
gardener –
it’s just a waste of space. The fig tree has failed to live up to his
expectations. It makes no sense to keep it.

But the gardener, rather bravely, considering he is just a servant,
takes a
risk and answers his master back. No, he says, leave it a while. Let me
dig
around it and manure it, and then we’ll see.

Now, which of the men in this story would Jesus’ hearers assume
represented
God? Probably the one with the power, the demanding, exacting owner,
judging
his fig tree and finding it wanting, punishing it with death. But it
isn’t the
owner who represents God in this story. It is the gardener; the
gardener who is
patient and generous. Not only is he patient and generous, he knows how
to help
this unfruitful fig, and he is prepared to put himself out to give it
what it
needs to thrive. “Dig around the roots and cut them back,” he says. It
is good
advice. Figs fruit better if their roots are restricted or pruned.
Allow them a
long root run and all they’ll produce is leaves. “Then give it some
manure.
Feed it and nurture it. Give it a chance and tend it lovingly,
and who
knows we may yet be eating its fruit a year from now. “
God is not a fearsome judge, this parable tells us, who waits to catch
us out,
who is always ready to punish us if we renege on our side of some
terrifying
bargain. Instead he is the eternally hopeful gardener, who sees every
day as a
new chance, whatever we have done in our “youth and childhood”. Every
day is a
day when we can start to grow and thrive in his care.

So often people expect God to tell them that they are not good enough,
that
they deserve what they get and they get what they deserve, and it’s no
good
complaining about it. But Jesus tells us instead of a God who longs to
heal and
nurture. It is we who are the unreasonable judges, quick to condemn
ourselves
and condemn others too, the impatient landowner who would cut down the
fit
without a second thought. In the Old Testament reading Isaiah too
challenges
that common picture of a vengeful God. “Come buy wine and milk without
money
and without price” his God calls out. “Return to the Lord, for he will
abundantly pardon”.

I would love to know why suffering happens. I’d love to know a way of
avoiding
it. I’d love to have a magic wand to wave over the pain that I see
around me.
But the truth is that I don’t know why things turn out as they do, and
there is
no magic wand. What I do know is that it is not the case that we get
what we
deserve, or that we deserve what we get. Jesus got the cross, and he
didn’t
deserve that. But as he went through the darkness of death he
discovered that
God was with him still, that this shameful fate was not a sign of
rejection, or
a sign that he had failed, but a way to life and peace instead. Never
mind what
you did “somewhere in your youth or childhood,” whether it was good or
bad, he
tells us. Don’t waste your time obsessively scratching around for sin
in your
life, or in the lives of others, for someone to blame or for a reason
to blame
yourself. Instead hear God’s call to you to come, now, as you are, to
eat and
drink of his goodness, to grow and thrive in his care today.
Amen.

Today’s Old Testament reading is pretty strange stuff. Visions of
flaming
torches, bizarre animal sacrifices, and “a deep and terrifying
darkness” that
descends on the Old Testament Patriarch Abram. It probably sounds like
a whole
lot of mystical mumbo jumbo, and it seems a million miles away from our
experience. But despite its strangeness, actually this story is one
that has
some important things to communicate to us.

The situation is this. Abram has been called by God to leave his
native
land of Haran and go to a new land – the land that will one day be
called
Israel. God has promised to make his name great in this new country.
Through
him all the families of the earth will be blessed, God says. But God
has never
really spelt out the detail of this grand plan, and, after a while,
Abram
begins to wonder how on earth God is going to fulfil his promise. You
see, the
problem is that he and his wife Sarai have no children, and they are
far too
old to expect any now. How can you be the father of a multitude, when
you don’t
even seem to be able to be the father of one?

Childlessness can be a painful challenge now for couples who are unable
to
conceive, but in the ancient world it was regarded as a disaster.
Children were
vital; they were the family work force, they would look after you in
old age,
and after you died, they would remember you, tend your tomb, carry on
the
family line. They were the nearest thing you would get to immortality –
a
belief in life after death wasn’t well developed at this time. Without
children
many people thought that their lives and their labours would all have
been in
vain, vanishing into the sands of time. This is what Abram and Sarai
face. Who
will inherit their property? Only Eliezer, a servant who has apparently
been
nominated as heir in the absence of children. He and his family will
take over
all they have worked for. Who will remember Abram and Sarai? Who will
tend
their tombs? No one. And if that is going to be the case, what is the
point of
him making this Herculean journey, uprooting himself from the society
he knows.
It will all be for nothing in the end?

God hears Abram’s fears, and he answers. He WILL have his own
offspring, says
God. Look at the stars, God says, as Abram gazes up into the night sky.
You
will have as many children as that.

It sounds wonderful. Abram tries to believe him, he wants to believe
him, he
says he believes him. But right now, adrift in the desert, with no
clear idea
of his journey’s end, how can he be sure that it will really turn out
the way
God says? Should he really risk abandoning the life he has for the
chance of
the life God is offering him? Turning round and going home must seem
very
attractive.

Until he set off on this journey across the desert his life was all
mapped out.
As I have said, his childlessness meant that it wasn’t mapped out the
way he
wanted it to be. But at least he knew where he stood. He knew the land
he lived
in, where the good grazing was and the water holes. He had his business
networks. He knew who to trust, who to trade with. He knew how
his world
worked. But this new life God calls him to is a completely unknown
territory,
geographically, emotionally and spiritually. Theoretically it is going
to be
better than what he has, but we all know how threatening change – even
change
for the better – can feel. It is amazing what we will put up with just
because
it is the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t. We’ll often
settle for
familiar pain or sadness, with situations that are far from what we
really
want, because the path that leads to a better future seems frightening
or
risky. The “deep and terrifying darkness” that comes down on Abram is
the
darkness of an unimaginable future that God is inviting him to step
into and
many of us will be able to identify with him.

“Deep and terrifying darkness” is something that confronts most of us
at sime
time or other – times when there is a choice to be made; to stick to
the status
quo, even if it is bad, or to step out into the unknown. Some of those
choices
are to do with personal situations ; perhaps we know something is wrong
in our
lives, we need to ask for help, see a doctor or counsellor, break a bad
habit,
leave a job, retrain for something new. Some of those choices may have
to do
with our relationships; perhaps we need to confront someone close to
us, to
speak an uncomfortable truth to them. We may need to end a
relationship, or
start a relationship. We may need to blow the whistle on some injustice
at
work. Sometimes change beckons to us in our church lives or in
the
community. A new opportunity opens up, but dare we respond. Are we
really up to
it? I often meet people for whom even the action of stepping over that
threshold into church for a service is a “deep and terrifying
darkness”. They’d
like to come, but they are afraid; afraid of making a fool of
themselves
because they don’t know what to do, or maybe afraid – as perhaps we all
should
be – that they will meet with God here, that what they encounter will
change
them.
For some people these moments of decision may be literally
life-threatening.
All over the world there are people who know that confronting injustice
may
mean persecution or even death. Saulo and Ruth de Barros, whom we
support
as part of our “Away Giving”, are two such people. Saulo is the
Anglican Bishop
of the Amazon, and part of his and Ruth’s work involves
championing the rights
of the landless people or very poor local farmers in parts of the
Amazon which
are, he says, virtually lawless, controlled by powerful local families
In a recent letter he said this. “There are towns and villages where
one family
holds all the power and if you speak out in protest you disappear. As
many as
200 priests and lay ministers from different churches have been
threatened,
most of them live in the Amazon area.’
‘Despite being threatened, you have to keep going. I would prefer
my son
and daughter to think of me as someone who died rather than just sat in
a
church. Once you have opened your eyes to it you can’t turn your back.
We live
in an unequal world; you see how many people are suffering and you
think what
right have I to ignore their plight?’
He added: ‘Friends say “you have done enough, you can’t change the
world”, but
if everyone thought like that where would we be?’
Saulo and Ruth have chosen to be where they are, and do the work that
they do,
because they want a better future of justice and peace for the people
of the
Amazon and for its natural environment, but it is a hard choice,
because they
know that the path is dangerous. I am sure that they have faced and
continue to
face many times of “deep and terrifying darkness” as they tread that
path.

In the Gospel reading Jesus makes an equally risky and frightening
choice. His
preaching has reached the ears of King Herod – the same man that
ordered the
killing of John the Baptist. Herod is a dangerous enemy. Jesus
could, if
he chose, take the path of safety – get out of the way, keep quiet.
That is
what the Pharisees want him to do. They might be genuinely concerned
for him,
but they are probably also concerned for themselves. He is stirring
people up,
disturbing the status quo, and this can only lead to trouble. Surely it
would
be better just to let things be, even if they aren’t perfect. Better
the devil
you know…

But Jesus is having none of it. It is not that he is superhuman, above
fear and
doubt. In the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him sweating blood,
wrestling
with his fears – a vivid picture of his “deep and terrifying darkness”.
But
running away will mean turning away from what he know needs to be done,
and he
refuses to do that.

There was a lot of fuss a few years ago about a film called “The Last
Temptation of Christ”. I never quite understood why, as it was asking a
question and making a point that was very powerful. It asked what would
have
happened if Jesus had chosen to reject his calling, to opt for safety
instead
of the cross. It showed him imagining a normal family life, working as
a
carpenter in quiet obscurity. It was a future that had its attractions,
but he
realised that if he chose this quiet life his message would be lost,
lives that
he should have touched for good would remain unchanged. And so he chose
the
hard path, the path that led to death on the cross, but ultimately also
to
life, not just for him, but for all of us.

Today’s Gospel story is a picture of true courage – courage that knows
the
risks and takes them anyway, that acknowledges the cost, and is
prepared to pay
it. “Today, tomorrow and the next day, I must be on my way,” says
Christ, not
because he wants to suffer, but because that is the only way in which
the
kingdom of God can come.

Our moments of choice may not be as dramatic as his, or as Ruth and
Saulo’s,
but they are just as real – the darkness can seem just as deep and
terrifying –
and they are just as important. God beckons each of us into a new and
better
future - a future that we make for ourselves and for others too, but it
is
often a path that takes us on a route we have never travelled before,
to a
destination we can’t imagine. God’s promise to us, as it was to Abram
and
Jesus, is that it is a journey worth making, and that he will walk
beside us
every step of the way. It is up to us whether are prepared to put our
hand into
his and walk through the night into the new day.

Amen

February 25th 2007 - Lent 1 - Fairtrade Fortnight

The
sermon was introduced by the "voices"
of two growers in the third world, and two "shoppers " here.
Their words can be read below.

In
a sense the case for Fairtrade speaks for itself. When we hear those
voices, telling us the differences between the lives of those who
can sell
through fair-trade networks and those who can’t it is obvious what we
should
do. But the fact is that, though fair-trade has made huge inroads into
our
shopping habits – you can get all sorts of fairly trade goods now,
quite easily
– fair trade shopping can still seem like an optional extra, something
we might
do if it doesn’t cost us any more, if it doesn’t involve any more
effort on our
part, if there is enough pay-off for us in terms of feeling good.
And that is not really enough. It is not really what it is all about.
Picking
up the chocolate bar with the fair-trade mark on it is a good thing,
but the
commitment to trade justice needs to have far deeper roots in us than
that if
it is really to make a difference. It is our whole attitude to the
world – the
earth we share and all that it produces – which needs changing if the
situation
of growers like those we have just heard from is really to change.

Today’s Old Testament lesson might not seem to have much to do with
twenty-first century global trading, but actually it is fundamental to
the
whole matter. It’s a reading from the end of the book of Deuteronomy,
near the
end of the Israelites long journey across the wilderness from slavery
in Egypt
to freedom in the promised land of Israel. As they approach their
journey’s end
Moses speaks to them.

This is a rich and fertile land they are entering, very different from
the
hardships of the desert that has been their home for so long. Though
there will
still be struggles, life is about to get a whole lot easier for them.
They will
be able to plant crops and see them through to the harvest – something
you
can’t do if you are a nomad. But there is a danger in all this. Soon,
God
knows, they will start to look at the riches of this land not as a
gift, but as
an entitlement. They will regard them as their land, their crops, their
wealth.
And what happens when we start to treat the land as if it belongs to
us, as if
we can own and control it? History tells us that we become territorial,
aggressive, unwilling to allow others a share in the good things it
produces.

In fact our idea of ownership of land is really a bit of a nonsense. We
don’t
own the land, whatever our laws might proclaim. No one can own land in
any
permanent way. We are just stewards, tenants, temporary occupants and
beneficiaries of its life. It would be more accurate to say that the
land owns
us, since we are far more dependent on it than it is on us. And
Christians
would go further than this .The earth is the Lord’s and everything in
it,
proclaims Psalm 24.

The harvest ritual that the people of Israel are told to perform each
year is
meant to remind them of this truth. They are to give the first fruits
of their
harvest to God as an offering – not the leftovers, the surplus, which
would be
far easier to do, but the first fruits. That is a real sacrifice,
because who knows
what will happen to the rest of the harvest? But giving the first
fruits
acknowledges that this is not their produce to do what they want with,
but the
generous gift of God entrusted to them to share. As they make their
offering,
says Moses, the people must tell themselves again the truth about
themselves
and their world. “A wandering Aramean was my father,” they must recite.
They
are the descendents of a homeless traveller. They have known slavery –
hardship, hunger and powerlessness. And it is God who has rescued them
from it
and given them this new life in a land “flowing with milk and honey”,
not their
own might. As they lay their offering down they shall say, “I bring you
the
first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”
Then, and
only then, can they join with all the people of the land – including
the
“aliens” – strangers in their midst – to enjoy this bounty. It is
not
theirs; it is God’s. They are in a position of power now, as they
haven’t been
before. They have what they need and can share it with, or deny it to
others;
but this doesn’t mean that they should think that they have deserved or
are
entitled to their wealth.

This is a reminder that we all need. We learn early that what is ours
is ours,
and that we should hold onto it with all our might. If we do give or
share,
most of us still secretly think of what we have given as belonging to
us – ours
to do with as we please. It makes us feel good to give, but often we
fail to
see that actually, what we gave was never really ours anyway. The earth
is the
Lord’s and all that is in it.

From God’s viewpoint, to stand by and do nothing while others are
denied the
basics of life, to condone and support unjust trade practices, to
demand the
cheapest bargain in the supermarket without asking how it comes to be
so cheap,
so that we can preserve our wealth is really to steal from him, and to
steal
from his children, our brothers and sisters.

Like the Israelites in the Promised Land, we have power, but it is easy
for
that power to go to our heads, for us to think we are entitled to it.

In the Gospel reading Jesus faced the same temptation to throw his
power
around. Bread from stones, miraculous feats, authority over nations. He
could
have all this. But he recognised his own dependence on his Father, and
through
him, his connection with his fellow human beings – who were all God’s
children,
as he was. And so, instead of holding onto what he had – even his own
life – he
was able to let it go for the sake of others. His sense of security was
rooted
in his knowledge of his Father’s love for him – love that even death
couldn’t
defeat – so he didn’t need to try to find security in wealth or fame or
political influence.

We begin this season of Lent in the wilderness with him as he
contemplates the
gifts that God has showered on him, and in the wilderness with the
Israelites,
as they look forward to the milk and honey that they will soon enjoy.
It is
right, as we do so that we are aware of the riches that are in our
hands – the
money in our purses and wallets – and that we remind ourselves that
this is not
ours, whatever the world might say to us, but the gift of God to the
whole of
humanity.
Amen

Banana grower ‘A’
I grow bananas on a large plantation in Central America. Our pay is
very low.
Pesticides sprayed on the bananas can have terrible side effects – they
can
make men sterile. Women in the banana packing sheds suffer double the
normal
rate of leukaemia. Babies are born deformed. We don’t have any land of
our own,
so working on the plantation is the only way we can make a living.

Banana grower ‘B’
I grow bananas on a plantation in Costa Rica. Since we joined
Fairtrade, our
pay has increased. This means life is much better for us; we can afford
piped
water and electricity.
The environment has been improved too. Plastic waste is recycled, and
you can
walk around the banana plantation without smelling chemicals. This
means our
health has improved. Weeds are pulled up by hand, instead of using
harmful
herbicides, and workers have been sent on training courses.
Fairtrade has given us the opportunity to help ourselves – we can look
forward
to the future, instead of wondering how we’ll survive.

Tea grower ‘A’
I work on a large tea estate in India. It is back breaking work, but
our pay is
very low. This means that, as we earn so little, the children have to
work too.
They don’t go to school.
Our houses are in a terrible condition, but if we complain to the
estate
manager we risk losing our jobs. Any shelter is better than none.

Tea grower ‘B’
I also work on a large tea estate in India. It is very hard work, but
in the
last few years life has taken a turn for the better. Our estate now
sells tea
through Fairtrade. We have used some of the extra money from Fairtrade
to buy
an ambulance. The biggest difference the money has made is in providing
electricity to the workers’ houses. This means women now have more time
- they
don’t have to collect firewood, and the houses are smoke-free which is
healthier for us all. Before we had electricity many people had
breathing
problems, more women had miscarriages and birth complications. Another
advantage is that children have light to study at night.

Cocoa grower ‘A’
When cocoa prices fall, we have to make difficult decisions. We may
have to put
off sending our children to school, and we can only afford to buy
medicines for
members of the family who have paid work.
It’s not just the people who get ill – capsids and mealy bugs can
destroy much
of the cocoa crop each year, if we’re not able to look after the plants
properly.
Another problem is traders who rip us off – they don’t always weigh our
cocoa
beans fairly, or pay us cash.
We can’t grow anything else – we wouldn’t be able to market it.

Cocoa grower ‘B’
Things are really looking up for us since we’ve been selling our cocoa
through
Fairtrade. We have a long-term contract with the chocolate company, so
our hard
work pays off. Farmers who had to leave their farms to look for paid
work have
returned to their villages to grow cocoa. Communities are back together
again.
We’ve used some of the extra money from Fairtrade to make a concrete
floor in
our house – before we just had a dirt floor. We can now afford to send
our
children to secondary school, as well as buying them schoolbooks and
shoes.
We’ve also planted more cocoa because of our confidence in Fairtrade –
it gives
us a good price. Fairtrade really does make a difference.

Shopper ‘A’
When I peel a banana, or tuck into a bar of chocolate, or pour a cup of
tea, I
don’t think about the person who grew it. I don’t think they are
anything to do
with me, so it isn’t my problem. As for Fairtrade – why should I pay a
bit more
when other brands are cheaper? If these people want to earn more they
should
sell their crops through Fairtrade too.

Shopper ‘B’
Farmers can’t just switch to Fairtrade and earn more money. If they
could, they
would! This is where we come in. What we choose when we shop affects
people
thousands of miles away. If we choose Fairtrade brands, demand for them
will
grow, and more farmers will be able to join Fairtrade. It may cost us a
few
pence more, but don’t you think it’s a small price to pay when our
choices
really do make a difference?

You may know that the Oscar Winning movie Chariots of Fire tells the
story of
two athletes at the 1920 Paris Olympics. Harold Abrahams, after a
gigantic
struggle as much against himself as the other runners, won the gold
medal in
the 100 yards. Eric Liddell, the Christian who refused to run on a
Sunday,
switched events and won gold in the 440 yards. It was a moving double
story all
the more remarkable for being true.

Then there’s Kelly Holmes who won both 800 and 1500 metres gold medals
at the
last Olympics. My children went to see her victory parade in Tonbridge
and
squashed in the huge crowds could get nowhere near her. A year later
when she
had come back down to earth she could be found giving talks and doing
promotions at such highbrow venues as Bat & Ball sports where she
had time
to talk and pose for photos with each individual admirer.

Back at the ‘Chariots of Fire’ Olympics, the theologian Tom Wright
reminds us
that after the games were over, the movie shows all the athletes
returning to
London, and spilling out excitedly onto Waterloo station. All except
Harold
Abrahams. His girlfriend waits anxiously as the crowd thins out. Only
when they
have all gone does Harold emerge slowly from the train. He has achieved
what he
set out to do. He has the long coveted prize in his hands. He has been
up the
mountain, and is realizing that whatever he does now he will never
stand there
again. He has come down from the giddy heights and now it is time to
face
reality.

The gospel reading from Luke today poses the question, why are we
reading of
the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent?

A possible answer could be – to offer us encouragement before we set
out on our
Lenten journey. Eight days earlier, again during a time of prayer,
Jesus told
his disciples ‘ The Son of Man has to endure great sufferings, and to
be
rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes, to be put to death,
and to
be raised on the third day.’ Jesus is about to set out to Jerusalem and
the
Cross but before we contemplate his suffering we are given this
mountain top
moment as foretaste of how it will reveal his glory.

If the readings from Exodus and Luke are read consecutively we could
almost be
forgiven for wondering if we are hearing echoes. Jesus is on the
mountain like
Moses when he met with God; his face was also transfigured by the
encounter.
The disciples like Moses find God in a cloud.

Like our athlete, Harold Abrahams, Peter finds it hard to accept the
need to
come back down to earth and wants to capture the moment, to bottle it
up. He
clearly has left his camera/phone at home so wants to try and preserve
it by
building three structures, one each for Jesus, Moses and Elijah and
it’s at this
point that the disciples are enveloped by the cloud and told to ‘Listen
to
Him.’ They have to face up to the need to come down from the mountain,
take up
their cross and follow him. They weren’t able to understand at this
time, that
the glory they had glimpsed on the mountain would finally be unveiled
on a
little hill outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile Paul seems as positive about veils as Jack Straw was a few
months ago
when he described the Muslim veil as ‘a visible statement of separation
and of
difference.’

Perhaps these words, for different reasons, are appropriate for Moses
who can
now be himself only in God’s presence; with everyone else he must be
veiled.

Paul contrasts this with his own boldness as a minister of the new
covenant. He
implies that the veil is a sign of the Israelites determination not to
see what
is offered to them. He feels they deliberately put a barrier between
themselves
and God, one which will remain until Jesus removes it.

He urges us not to veil things but to be open and honest. Taken a stage
further
could Paul have been thinking of the veil of the temple torn in two at
the
crucifixion? Once again a symbol of separation keeping apart the Holy
of Holies
where God dwelt from the rest of the Temple where men dwelt. This
signified that
man was separated from God by sin. Above all, the tearing of the veil
at the
moment of Jesus' death dramatically symbolized that His sacrifice would
open
the way into the Holy of Holies for all people, for all time, both Jew
and
gentile.

As we consider our individual faith and our approach to Lent this year
it may
help to ask ourselves these three questions.

We heard God’s words ‘This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him’. Can we
set
aside some time to listen?

Are there veils in our lives which we can do something about? Veils
that
needlessly separate us from a closer relationship with God.

Do we want to stay on the mountain top where Christ can be seen in his
glory,
or are we ready to come down and to face up to the need to follow Jesus
through
suffering, death and resurrection?

That might seem a strange question to ask. After all, here you are in
church,
giving up an hour or so of your Sunday morning. I can probably fairly
safely
assume that most of you would answer “yes”. And you wouldn’t be alone
in that.
Surveys consistently reveal that around 70% of the British population
say they
believe in God – even if they don’t go to church - and the figure would
be much
higher in many other parts of the world. The number of genuine atheists
in the
world is fairly small.

But the problem with those surveys is that they make it sound like such
a
simple question with a simple answer. ”Do you believe in God?”- Yes or
no, tick
one box only, delete as applicable. But the reality is that it isn’t a
simple
question, and there isn’t a simple answer either.

For a start, not everyone means the same thing by that little word
“God”. For
some God is a vague spiritual presence, an impersonal life-force. For
others
God is an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, a literal
embodiment
of the picture language of the Bible and Christian tradition. Every
religion
describes God in different ways and every believer within that religion
will
have their own ideas and interpretations too. Our images of God are
shaped by
our upbringing – the things that happen to us, the things we are taught.

When people tell me that they don’t believe in God, I sometimes ask
them to
tell me about the God they don’t believe in. Often they tell me about a
fearsome, distant, vengeful figure, arbitrarily sending people to hell,
or
making them suffer in some way. “I don’t believe in that God either,” I
tell
them, “or at least, if God is like that I certainly don’t want to
worship and
serve him.” It’s often a surprise to them to realise that their picture
is only
one among many.

So, asking whether someone believes in God tells us very little – “God”
is a
word that needs a lot of unpacking.

But it’s not just the word “God” that can muddy the waters. The word
“believe”
can be just as misleading.
For some people belief is something that happens in your head. It’s a
matter of
accepting the philosophical idea of a divine being, weighing up the
intellectual arguments and coming to a rational decision. For
others it
is in the heart – a feeling that there is something there, or a hope
that there
might be – a comforting presence. Some think believing in God means
believing
things about God and the Christian story. Creation, Virgin Birth,
Resurrection,
the Second Coming. If you can tick all the boxes, you can call yourself
a
believer. Accepting these things, or at least saying you do, is what
matters.
Belief can even be regarded as a sort of bargaining chip. “I’ll believe
in you,
God, and in return I’ll expect you to help me out when I need it” -
like a
voter, giving a pledge of support to a candidate in an election. I’ll
scratch
your back if you’ll scratch mine.

Do you believe in God? It all depends what you mean by “God” and what
you mean
by “believe”. It’s not nearly as simple as it first appears.

There’s a question about faith at the centre of today’s Gospel reading;
that
dramatic story of the stilling of the storm on the lake of Galilee. But
the
question Jesus asks of his disciples isn’t “Do you believe in God?” it
is a
much more interesting and useful question - “Where is your faith?”

I confess I have often read this as if it were a rebuke, as if Jesus
were
saying, “You ought to have known that God would still the storm – what
kind of
disciples are you if you can’t believe that?” But lately I have come to
question that interpretation. After all, when the storm blew up they
did call
for help. They woke Jesus up precisely because they thought he would be
able to
help them. Isn’t that faith? Of course it is.

But what Jesus is concerned about is what sort of faith this is, what
it depends
on – where is your faith? What is it in? He is aware that, at the
moment,
their faith is strongly tied up with their circumstances, what happens
to them.
If things are going right, they will believe, but if things are going
wrong,
what then? A faith that is dependent on God intervening to protect us
from pain
and suffering – doing what we want him to - is a dangerously fragile
faith.
Jesus knows that this is not the sort of faith they need. It matters
that they
get to grips with this because soon they will watch him suffer and die
on the
cross. There will be no miraculous rescue there, no stilling of the
storms of
pain and death that swept over him. And they’ll face persecution as
well – most
of those first disciples will eventually die for their faith. If their
faith is
based on God stopping the bad things happening, it will be no use to
them then.

There’s another problem too. Where is their faith? At the moment,
it is
clear that it’s in Jesus, all wrapped up in his physical presence. They
shelter
behind him, look to him for the answers, run to him when they don’t
know what
to do. But soon he will be taken from their sight, and what will they
do then?
Just as children must eventually learn to stand on their own two feet
in the
world and trust their own judgement, we need to develop a faith that is
our
own– that makes sense to us and is embedded in our own lives, rather
than being
dependent on someone else to do our believing for us.

When Jesus asks “Where is your faith?” his real concern isn’t that they
don’t
have any, but that it is in the wrong things, dependent on
circumstances,
second-hand, and because of that, it won’t sustain them when they need
it to.
What they really need is to learn that God loves them and is with them,
whatever happens, for good or ill, in triumph or disaster, in life and
in
death, sinking or swimming. And they need to learn that for themselves,
each
one of them. “Where is your faith?” Jesus asks them. And he asks us the
same
question too. Where is our faith? What does it depend on?

There’s a theologian called John Westerhoff, who once described four
different
styles of believing, styles we might progress through, or flit between
at
different periods of our lives. I’ve always found his descriptions
helpful. I
recognise myself in them; perhaps you might too. As I run through them,
ponder
your own faith, and see whether these descriptions ring any bells for
you.

First he talks about experienced faith. This is common in early
childhood. It’s
an unquestioning acceptance of the world as it is – an uncomplicated
enjoyment
of the sights and sounds around us, a sense of awe and wonder at the
world. It
doesn’t look for meaning; it takes things as they are. “But trailing
clouds of
glory do we come/From God who is our home;/Heaven lies about us in our
infancy!” as Wordsworth put it.

Then there is what he calls affiliative faith. This sort of faith is
all tied
up with belonging to a particular community, and it often develops as
childhood
progresses. We pick up our beliefs from others, from parents and Sunday
school
teachers. “I am a Christian because my parents are, because I go to
church,
because my friends and neighbours are. I do what they do. I believe
what they
believe.” There’s nothing wrong with this sort of faith in itself, but
we can
easily end up stuck in it, unable to think for ourselves.

Thirdly there’s what he calls searching faith. Teenagers and young
adults often
show this sort of faith – and sometimes it doesn’t look much like faith
at all!
It’s not content with other people’s answers – searching faith
challenges and
questions everything. It can be alarming to go through and to
watch.
Everything is thrown up in the air, certainties are rejected. It can
look as if
something is going wrong, but actually it is usually a good sign, a
sign that
faith is growing not dying. We need to question and doubt if we are
going to
develop a faith we can understand, a faith that is our own, not
second-hand, a
faith that makes sense to us.

If we get through this questioning, Westerhoff says, we may, just may,
find
ourselves with his fourth style of faith – mature faith. This is a
faith that
we have consciously accepted and acknowledged as our own. It is a faith
that
makes a difference to how we live. It has consequences. It involves
commitment.
It’s not just words in the head, or a warm feeling in the heart. It’s
not a
bargaining counter to be offered to God. It doesn’t depend on things
going
right with us. It is flexible and resilient, so that when the storms of
life
come upon us, it won’t be destroyed. For most of us this sort of faith
is a
long time coming, if it ever comes, but it is the faith we really need
when the
storms of life rage about us.

“Where is your faith?” asks Jesus of us. What is it rooted in? What
difference
does it make to the way you live? And most important of all, what are
you doing
to make sure that it is growing as it should?
When he asked this question of the disciples they had no answer for
him. They
were too amazed to say anything. He didn’t push it. He just left them
to ponder
his question. So I’m going to do the same, as we hold a minute or two
of
silence and think about our own lives. “”Where is your faith?”
Amen

What do your clothes say about you?
You may be someone who is deeply interested in fashion, or you might
never give
it a second thought, but whether we like it or not the clothes we wear
send out
messages about what we think of ourselves, how we see ourselves. The
colours we
choose – sombre and understated or vibrant – the styles, formal and
elegant or
relaxed and casual – tell people at a glance what we are like. That’s
why
people usually dress with such care for important moments like
interviews. Our
clothes, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not,
are a
powerful means of self-expression.

But they aren’t just about self-expression. Just as clothes can tell
others who
we are and what we are like, our clothes can also send messages
inwards, to
ourselves. Put on a sharp suit and you will feel altogether more
powerful and
businesslike than if you were wearing jeans. A tie for men, a pair of
heels for
women, and you feel instantly smarter and more together. When a school
is
failing and a new head is drafted in, the first thing they seem to do
is to
introduce a new school uniform and insist it is worn. The theory is
that if
children are dressed smartly they will take more pride in their school,
and in
themselves too.
Anyone here who has ever worn a uniform as part of their work will know
the
difference it can make. You don’t just put on the clothes, you put on
the role
as well. I remember when I was first ordained, wearing a clerical
collar seemed
very odd – I was aware of people noticing it. I noticed it myself – who
were
they looking at? It marked the transition though, between being a
private
individual to being someone who was recognised, for better or worse, as
a
representative of the church. Wearing the collar helped me to make that
transition.

So when Paul writes to the Colossians, “Clothe yourself with
compassion,
kindness, humility, meekness and patience” we can see what he is
getting at.
What you wear, whether it is a smart suit, a uniform, or a clerical
collar,
shapes your understanding of yourself – it makes you a different
person.
Putting on the garments of compassion, says Paul, works in the same
way. If we
do it consistently we become compassionate people.
We might feel that compassion and love shouldn’t be something that is
put on –
it is either there or it isn’t. We live in an age when people are very
concerned with authenticity, with listening to their feelings. “Putting
on”
something sounds hypocritical, as if we are just dressing up,
pretending. But
Paul recognises that truth that we have just touched on. What we wear
doesn’t
just reflect who we are. It shapes us too.

It is no accident that the “uniform” of monks and nuns is called a
habit. The
word “habit” was used interchangeably in the past to mean both the
clothes
people wore and those deeply ingrained ways of behaving that they had
built up
over the year. The words custom and costume come from a shared
root too –
the Latin “consuetudinem”- routine, ritual, something you do again and
again.
Just as people got dressed day by day in the same clothes without
really
thinking of it – it was a daily routine – so their daily behaviour, the
multitude of small words and deeds, would eventually shape their
characters and
become second nature to them.

Clothe yourself with compassion, says Paul. Put on love. Make the
decision to
act lovingly, whether it is what you feel or not, and pretty soon it
will
become a habit – a good habit – something that you hardly even have to
think
about.
It was good advice – advice Paul knew the Colossian church needed. Made
up of
many different racial and social groups it was a melting pot that was
continually in danger of boiling over. Greek, Jew, circumcised and
uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free – there was almost
unlimited
possibility in this group of people for misunderstanding and mutual
suspicion.
It was important that they got into the habit of loving one another and
seeing
one another as children of the same Father.

Relationships in the family were full of potential for conflict as
well, he
said. They needed conscious effort if love was to grow. We may not
agree with
all that he says. The subjection of wives to husbands and slaves to
masters is
not a way of life we would advocate now. But this was a cultural
context very
different from our own, and Paul was concerned to help his readers
lives with
the realities of the lives they had then. But if some of his advice
seems dated,
some of it is just as relevant as it ever was. Children and parents are
still
just as capable of making each others lives hell as they were, and a
new study
last week of domestic abuse revealed that one woman in nine is abused
by her
husband or partner in any year. That might mean physical violence,
sexual
abuse, or emotional abuse – putting someone down, constantly
criticising,
controlling them and denying their right to privacy. One woman in nine
in any
year. Of course men are sometimes victims of abuse too, but it is
nowhere like
as common. “Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.”
Sadly it
appears that Paul’s words are as much needed now as ever.

In all our relationships, whether in the family, in the church, or in
any other
community, says Paul , it is what we do that counts. Feelings matter;
of course
they do. But if we wait until we feel compassionate, kind, humble, meek
and
patient we may be waiting forever. Putting on compassion is not just
play
acting, it is not just dressing up, it is creating the self that God
wants us
to be, so that we can also create relationships that will build up
rather than
destroy, that will enhance life rather than diminish it.

“You have died,” says Paul, “and your life is hidden with Christ in
God.” In
the early church the ritual of Baptism involved being clothed anew as
you came
up out of the water – it still does in some churches. You went down
into the
water, buried with Christ, drowned with him in the deep water of death,
and
just as he had risen to a new life, so did you. The white robe given as
you
emerged from the font was a symbol of that new life. But this robe –
this new
life- is something we must continue to put on, day by day, if it is
really to
make a difference. The robe must become a habit , so that the outer
clothing
becomes the inner truth. Whatever our clothes say about us, whether we
are
dedicated followers of fashion or unrepentantly scruffy, let us pray
for
diligence and perseverance to put on each day and in every circumstance
the
clothing of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience and love
until
the costume becomes a custom and the garment becomes a habit.

Amen

Third Sunday before Lent - 4th Feb 07Isaiah
6.1-13, 1 Cor 15.1-11, Luke 5.1-11
You have to feel sorry for Simon Peter. There he was, one ordinary
morning,
washing his nets by the side of the lake. He hadn’t had a good night;
he’d
caught nothing, not a single fish. But sometimes fishing is like that,
and he
was used to taking the rough with the smooth. He wasn’t too worried.
Tomorrow
night would probably be different – the fish were out there somewhere!
His long
years of experience taught him that.
But just as he had resigned himself to his lack of success, the day
took an
unexpected turn – and not necessarily for the better. He hadn’t even
noticed
Jesus standing and watching him, but all of a sudden there was this
stranger,
climbing into his boat, without so much as a by-your-leave. “Hey! What
do you
think you’re doing? That’s my boat you’re getting into.” Then Simon
noticed the
crowd gathering. Jesus asked him to put out a little from the shore.
Frankly he
was too stunned to argue.
And Jesus began to teach. We don’t know what he had to say, but Simon
doesn’t
seem to mind just sitting there and listening to him. He had nothing
else to do
anyway– no fish to clean and sell, that’s for certain, because he
hadn’t caught
any.

But when Jesus asks Simon to head out into deep water and cast his nets
there,
Simon draws the line. “Ok, look, you’re a good teacher, I’ll give you
that. The
stories were interesting, the teaching was wise, but I’m the fisherman
here,
and I can tell you, I fished this patch last night, all last night, and
there’s
nothing here, not a sprat, not a minnow. If there was, I’d have found
it. Just
because you know the Bible, just because you can preach a good sermon,
don’t
let it go to your head – you’re in my territory now.” Jesus just
looked
at him. “Oh all right then, I’ll give it a go, since you seem so
convinced –
but I can tell you, there’s nothing there!”

So Simon rowed out into the deep water, cast his nets, and before he
knew where
he was they were full, and overflowing, as if the fish just couldn’t
stay away.
In the end he had to call his friends in the other boat to come and
help, and
even then the boat nearly sank under the weight of the catch.

Now I don’t know how you’d have reacted to this. Simon ought to have
been
overjoyed – like he’d won the lottery. I am reminded of those jubilant
people
on Branscombe beach, scavenging among the wreckage for the cargo that
was shed
from the MSC Napoli, and, in some cases at least, finding real
treasure. Those
fish were just there for the taking, and Jesus didn’t even ask for
anything in
return.

But that isn’t how Simon reacts. Instead he falls to his knees and
cries out,
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” We get to know Simon
Peter
pretty well as the Gospel progresses, and he isn’t usually reticent
about
himself and his own abilities. He’s not one for false modesty – never
know to
put himself down. He is usually first with an answer, even if it is the
wrong
one. He’s an entrepreneurial go-getter who has an almost indestructible
belief
in himself. But as he hauls in this enormous catch, a catch not found
by him
but by this carpenter turned teacher, who to the best of his knowledge
has
never cast a net in his life, he discovers that he is not the number
one top
fisherman of Galilee after all. It must be a bit humiliating frankly.
Suddenly
he sees that however powerful he thought he was there is one who is
infinitely
more powerful than him.

People sometimes describe Christianity, rather scathingly, as a crutch
for
those who are too inadequate to cope with life without it, something to
console
those who have fallen on hard times. Karl Marx said that religion was
the
opiate of the masses – a drug that dulled the feelings and made the
painful
struggles of life bearable. Get rid of inequality, empower people and
there
would be no need for it, he thought. But what fascinates me about Simon
Peter
in this story is that actually, as far as we know, he was doing just
fine when
Jesus came along. He hadn’t caught anything the night before, but
there’s no
suggestion that he was worried about it. He wasn’t starving or
destitute. He
owned his own boat. He had made a comfortable enough life for himself.
The other two other men we meet in our readings today could hardly be
described
as needy either. We don’t know much about Isaiah, but there’s no reason
to
suspect he was particularly messed up, and Paul was at the height of
his powers
when he had that vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus that changed
his life.
He was a zealous, influential Pharisee, with plenty of friends in high
places,
highly regarded by the authorities. Like Simon Peter he wasn’t known
for his
lack of self-confidence. Quite the reverse. Yet, just like Simon Peter,
when
Paul and Isaiah encounter God their lives are turned upside down. “Woe
is me. I
am lost!” cries Isaiah, and Paul describes himself as the “least of the
apostles, unfit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church
of
God.”

No matter how powerful, how rich, how sorted out your life seems to be,
these
stories tell us, when you meet with God you see them in a wholly
different
light. Christian faith is not just a consolation to the weak; it is a
challenge
to the strong, causing them to look again at the power they place so
much trust
in.

It sounds like a bit of a grim message. But actually it is the most
hopeful
message we could possibly hear.

It is so easy for those of us who have power and wealth – and that is
most of
us in the Western world, even if we don’t feel it to be so – to settle
for the
lives that power and wealth brings. We have enough to eat, somewhere to
live,
comfort and security. Our basic needs are met, so what else is there to
strive
for? Just more of the same. More food, more possessions, bigger better
houses,
more luxury. And yet all the studies show that it is not true that the
more we
have the happier we are. Beyond a certain level riches don’t make us
happy. The
rich are just as prone to depression as the poor. In a sense, our
power
and our wealth restrict us, because they convince us that our lives are
in our
hands, that it is all down to us what we do with them, yet often our
imagination and our courage are limited. We do what we know. We see
only the
possibilities that we have always seen, the things that have worked
well enough
to get us to where we are.

If Simon hadn’t met Jesus he would probably have carried on fishing,
made a
decent living for himself. No doubt he would have had some good
catches. But he
would never have had a catch like this one. This was something
completely beyond
his experience, something that made him realise that the life he had
put so
much effort into building was really just an empty shell. That all his
wealth,
however great or small it was, was nothing compared to what this man
could lead
him to. It wasn’t about the fish – he left that enormous haul behind
when he
followed Christ. The best catch of his life, and he left it on the
shore for
whoever wanted to take it! But it wasn’t about the fish. It was about
the
meaning Christ gave to his life, something that money could never buy,
no
matter how good a fisherman you were. He was an okay sort of bloke – a
good
enough fisherman, doing reasonably well for himself, but nothing out of
the
ordinary. Yet God chooses to show up in his life, as if his life really
mattered.
So perhaps, he thinks, it does really matter. And as it turns out he is
right –
his life is hugely important. In order for him to discover this,
though, he has
to leave his old patterns of life, his old security in his own ability
to
provide for himself. It is a huge challenge, but then again who is it
that has
enabled him to catch so many fish the boat nearly sinks? Not himself,
but
Jesus.

St Paul too, seems on the face of it to have a great deal to lose when
he
decides to follow Christ – status and respect, even life itself. And
yet he
says of himself in one of his letters that he counts all that he has
lost as so
much rubbish in comparison with what he’s gained. Whatever he has given
up was
worth it.

Today’s Gospel story is full of passionate generosity. It speaks to us
of a God
who is not content simply to come to those who are broken, desperate,
destitute, and make their lives ok, bearable, but who also longs to
transform
the lives of those who feel they are doing fine, thank you. He comes to
batter
on our hearts, to shake us out of our complacency, to pour on us riches
that we
haven’t even imagined. Riches that are not to do with having more of
what we’ve
already got – money, power, status – but are in an entirely different
league.
The riches of love, community, meaning, the depth that comes from
facing and
sharing pain, the sense that our lives matter and make a difference. He
comes
to pour those riches upon us so that we in turn can bring them to
others. Leave
your nets, says Jesus to Simon, leave the world you know, the person
you think
you are, the riches you have acquired for yourself, the life you have
restricted yourself to having, and come and follow me.
Amen

Candlemas
07 – 28th January

Hebrews 2:10-18, Luke
2:22-40

There was
once, so it is said, a farmer who lived in India. He was reasonably
prosperous.
His farm was set in a broad fertile valley, watered by the river that
ran
through it. The farmer was content with his life, until one day a
traveller
came by and stopped at his house. He talked of the wonders he had seen
in the
world, and the wonders he still hoped to see. In particular he had
heard tell
of rumours that somewhere in the world was a place where diamonds could
be
found. Diamonds that could be picked up off the ground. Huge diamonds.
Acres of
diamonds. Diamonds shining with ice and fire, like only diamonds can.
The
farmer dreamt that night of those diamonds and by the time dawn came he
knew
that, however contented he had been with his life, he would not now be
able to
rest until he too had found these acres of diamonds.

But where
would he find them? Straightaway he leapt from his bed and went to the
house of
a holy man who lived nearby. The holy man was none to pleased to be
woken so
early, but he told him that, yes, he knew of this rumoured field of
diamonds,
but all he knew was that they could be found where a river ran over
white sand.

Despite the
enormity of the task the farmer could not be put off. He sold his farm,
his
livestock and all his possessions and made ready to leave. Before he
went he
took one last stroll around his land, over the fields and down to the
river.
His river ran over white sand, he thought to himself, but there were no
diamonds here, just dull, rough rocks. He picked one up and put
it on the
mantelpiece before he left, and then he went, and did not look back.

He travelled
through India. He travelled across the Middle East. He went into Africa
and
across the straits of Gibraltar to Europe. He crossed mountains and
deserts,
and found a thousand rivers, a thousand sandy river beds, but nowhere
did he
find so much as a single diamond, let alone an acre of them. He spent
all the
money he had on his search, and eventually became destitute. With
nothing but
the rags he stood up in, and not even the price of a loaf of bread to
his name,
he stood on yet another sandy beach where yet another river met the sea
and
despaired. And as he stood there a tidal wave came in, and swept him
away.

Truly, a
tragic tale. But it is not over yet. Soon after the farmer had left his
farm
its new owner arrived. He looked around at it will pleasure – here was
a good
place. Inside the house he saw the rock on the mantelpiece which the
old farmer
had left there. Perhaps it was the way the light fell just at that
moment, but
he noticed a little sparkle within it. Something like ice; something
like fire.
He picked the rock up and turned it over in his hands. Certainly there
was
something there. He took it to a trader in gems, and, sure enough, he
discovered that it was, indeed a diamond. And better still, he knew
that there
were plenty more where it came from, covering the bed of the river as
it flowed
over the white sand. Acres of diamonds.

The idea that
the treasure we seek is actually already close to us, or even within
us, is a
common one in folktales. There are many stories of poor people who
dream of
riches and travel the world in search of them, only to discover that
the
treasure they seek was under their own house, or hidden up a chimney
breast or
buried beneath their own vegetable patch.

And, in a
sense, the story we heard in today’s Gospel is not so very unlike those
ancient
folk tales.

It tells us of
a day in the Temple in Jerusalem – an ordinary day, a day like many
others. As
usual, the Temple was full of people – people who were also looking for
treasure. The treasure they sought was the Messiah, the one who would
bring
back God’s kingdom, his rule, to Israel. But how and when and where
this would
happen was a matter of fevered speculation. Some were looking for a
military leader,
some for a teacher. Some were convinced that only when the people of
Israel
kept the law perfectly would the Messiah appear. Some were convinced
that Moses
and Elijah would return to announce him. Regularly people claimed that
they
were the Messiah themselves, or acclaimed others as the Messiah. And
the Temple
was the place where everyone came to argue their position.

It’s no
surprise that on this day then, with all these people caught up in
their high
flown debates, one little family could so easily slip into the Temple
largely.
Whatever the Messiah was going to be like, this little trio – a
carpenter, his
young wife and their newborn baby – surely hadn’t got anything to do
with him?
They weren’t even rich – we know that, because they had brought an
offering of
just two pigeons in thanksgiving for their child. According to
the law
you should really bring a lamb as an offering- the pigeons were an
alternative
if you were too poor. They could have come and gone and no one would
have been
any the wiser – like those diamonds in the story they were easy to
miss.

But while most
people didn’t notice them, there were two people in the Temple who did
have
their eyes open that day. Two people who somehow saw the diamond glint
beneath
the ordinary exterior. How was it that they saw what everyone else had
overlooked? We don’t know for sure, but the passage tells us some
interesting
things about Simeon and Anna. They had both been fixtures in the Temple
for a
long time, for a start. Simeon was “righteous and devout”, and Anna
practically
lived there, praying and fasting day by day. They’d seen a lot of life
pass
through those Temple gates. They had seen people who were so desperate
to
believe in something that they’d believe in anything, people so
desperate to follow
someone that they’d follow anyone. They’d seen fads and fancies come
and go,
false hopes raised only to run into the sand of reality. Age doesn’t
necessarily bring wisdom, but it does provide you with a lot of
material for
reflection if you want to use it, and Simeon and Anna had done so.
After all
that watching and waiting, they knew what they believed in – not in the
latest
hare-brained idea, or self proclaimed Saviour, but in the love and
faithfulness
of God, who would not leave or forsake his people, God who kept his
promises.
They might not know how he was going to keep them. They might not feel
they had
a blue-print for the future, but they knew that God had not stopped
caring or
listening. That is the hardest, but greatest, sort of faith. We would
all far
rather have certainty, black and white answers, but the truth is that
life is a
work in progress – and our knowledge and understanding are imperfect
and
partial. Simeon and Anna had learned to look beyond their own ideas
into the
mystery of God, who was beyond them, and to expect to be surprised by
him.
Unlike the crowds in the Temple who thought they knew what God should
look like
and do, they had no difficulty in accepting that he might come as a
tiny child,
here and now. God could just as easily be found in the ordinary
as in the
extraordinary. He could even be found in times of humiliation and
suffering,
when it seemed to others that all was going wrong. “A sword shall
pierce your
own soul too” Simeon says to Mary, but that is not a sign of failure,
but part
of the process that leads to triumph.

Candlemas
marks the end of the Christmas Season in the church. After this service
we
shall take down the crib in the Lady Chapel. It has been there ever
since
Christmas Day, reminding us of that old story of the stable in
Bethlehem. It is
a good story, and good to be remember it each year. But it is important
that we
clear it away now, because otherwise we run the risk of getting stuck
in that
long ago and far away story, assuming that God needs angels, stars,
wise men to
come to his world. And if we do that we shall miss him in our everyday
lives,
which is where he really needs to be.

Candlemas is
actually on February 2nd – Friday. We’re celebrating it today because I
didn’t
think I’d get much of a congregation if I asked you to turn out then!
But
perhaps I can encourage you to mark it in your own way on Friday too. I
wonder
what that day will hold for you? Looking in my own diary, there’s
nothing too
dramatic. It’s just an ordinary day, with ordinary tasks. Perhaps yours
is the
same. So I think it would be a good for all of us to pause and
wonder, to
ask ourselves, “where is God in all of this? How does God come to us?
The
message of Candlemas is that this day, Friday, any day, might just be
the day
when God shows up in our lives, the day when we hold a diamond in our
hand. But
will we seen him, or will we miss him, convinced that here and now is
the last
place he would choose to be?